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30 Cents 


No. G24 JH. E. Br addon 


Kiiitered at the Post-Office at New York, as Second-class Mail Matter. Issued Monthly. Subscription Price per Year, 12 Nos., $5.00. 


THE FATAL THREE 


a Koud 


By M. E. BRADDON 

AUTHOR OP “aurora FLOYD ” “ ELEANOll’S VICTORY” “ ISIIMAEI. ” “ MOHAWKS ” 
“ VIXEN ” “ WYLLARD’s WEIRD ” “ UNDER THE RED FLAG ” ETC. 




NEW YOEK 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 

July, 1888 


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499. Miss Braddon’s The Mistletoe Bough for 1885 . , 20 


THE FATAL THEEE 


^ Noud 










BY 


M/Sy^BRADDON 




t/ 


AUTHOR OF “aurora FLOYD ” “ ELEANOR’S VICTORY” “ ISHMAEL ” “ MOHAWKS ” 
“vixen” “WYLLARD’s weird” “under THE RED FLAG” ETC. 


NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE ^ 

1888 




CONTENTS. 


BOOK L—C^emTO ; OR, THE SPINNINa OF THE WEB. 


THE KEY-NOTE 1 


CHAPTER 

I. 

PAGE 

CHAPTER VIII. 

PAGE 

“We hate been so Happy” . . . 


“ Such Things Were ” 

. 37 

CHAPTER 

II. 


CHAPTER IX. 


Fay 



The 'Face in the Church 

. 41 

CHAPTER 

III. 


CHAPTER X. 


A Superior Person . . 



There is Always the Skeleton . . . 

. 45 

CHAPTER 

w . 


CHAPTER XL 


All She Could Remember 


. . 12 

The Beginning of Doubt . . . , 

63 

CHAPTER 

V. 


CHAPTER XII. 


Without the Wolf . . 


. . 21 

“ She Cannot be LTnworthy ”. . . . 

. 58 

CHAPTER 

VI. • 

/ 

CHAPTER XHI. 


“Ah, Pity! the Lily is Withered” . 

, . 29 

Shall She be Less than Another? . 

. 61 

CHAPTER 

VII. 

/ 

CHAPTER XIV. 


Drifting Apart ... 


. 33 

Lifting the Curtain 

. 68 


BOOK II.—LACHESIS ; OR, THE BEGINNING OF DOOM. 


CHAPTER I. 

A Wife and No Wife . . . 

CHAPTER II. 

Sooner or Later 

CHAPTER III. 

The Counsel of the Church . 

CHAPTER lY. 

The Rich Miss Fausset . . . 

CHAPTER V. 

A Dark Outlook 

CHAPTER VI. 

The Ti.me has Come .... 


78 


85 


88 


. . 94 


104 


112 


CHAPTER YII. 

Not Proten 

CHAPTER YIII. 

Looking Back 

CHAPTER IX. 

A Wrecked Life 

CHAPTER X. 

Past and Present 

CHAPTER XL 

The Rift in the Lute . . . 

r ' CHAPTER XII. 

Darkness 


120 

128 

137 

•141 

146 

161 


IV 


CONTENTS. - 


BOOK III.— ATROPOS ; OR, THAT WHICH MUST BE. 


CHAPTER I. 
The Grave on the Hill . . 

CHAPTER II. 
Pamela Changes her Mind 

CHAPTER III. 
As THE Sands Run Down . . 


PAGE . 


CHAPTER V. 


156 


Liter A Script a Manet 


• 159 CHAPTER VI. 

Marked by Fate 

. 164 


CHAPTER TIL 


PAGE 

. 182 


189 


CHAPTER IV. 

How Should I Greet Thee?” .... 173 


Like a Tale that is Told 


193 


THE KEY-NOTE. 


There are some men who fashion their own lives with their own 
thoughts and their own actions, who start in their journey through the 
world with a settled purpose, and who progress steadily towards a chosen 
goal. There are other men who tread the maze of life blindly, whose 
highest hopes and noblest endeavors seem to be the sport of Fate — men 
around whose footsteps a fatal web has been woven, and who move uncon- 
sciously and inevitably towards darkest doom. For these virtue avails not, 
nor generous feeling, nor the love of truth and honor. They are born to 
fulfil a mysterious destiny, and from the cradle to the grave they are a 
pre-ordained sacrifice to the powers of evil. 





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THE FATAL THREE. 


OL^ 

BOOK ; on, THE SPINNING OF THE WEB. 


CHAPTER I. 

“we have been so happy.” 


‘T’m afraid she will be a terrible bore,” 
said the lady, with a slight pettishness in the 
tone of a voice that was naturally sweet, 

“ How can she bore us, love? She is only 
a child, and you can do what you like with 
her,” said the gentleman. 

“My dear John, you have just admitted 
that she is between thirteen and fourteen — 
a great deal more than a child — a great over- 
grown girl, who will want to be taken about 
in the carriage, and to come down to the 
drawing-room, and who will be always in the 
way. Had she been a child of Mildred’s age, 
and a playfellow for Mildred, I should not 
have objected half so much.” 

“ I’m very sorry you object; but I have no 
doubt she will be a playfellow for Mildred 
all the same, and that she will not mind 
spending a good deal of her life in the school- 
room.” 

“Evidently, John, you don’t know what 
girls of fourteen are. I do.” 

“Naturally, Maud, since it is not so many 
years since you yourself were that age.” 

The lad}'^ smiled, touched ever so slightly 
by the suggestion of youth, which was grati- 
fying to the mother of a seven -year -old 
daughter. 

The scene was a large old fashioned draw- 
ing-room, ill an old-fashioned street, in the 
very best quarter of the town, bounded on 


the west by Park Lane, and on the east by 
Grosvenor Square. The lady was sitting at 
her own particular table in her favorite win- 
dow in the summer gloaming; the gentle- 
man was lolling with his back to the velvet- 
draped mantle-piece. The room was full of 
flowers and prettinesses of every kind, and 
offered unmistakable evidence of artistic 
taste and unlimited means in its possessors. 

The lady was young and fair, a tall slip 
of a woman, who afforded a Court milliner 
the very best possible scaffolding for expen- 
sive gowns. The gentleman was middle- 
aged and stout, with strongly marked feat- 
ures, and a resolute, straightforward expres- 
sion. The lady was the daughter of an Irish 
peer — the gentleman was a commoner, whose 
fortune had been made in a great wholesale 
house, which had still its mammoth ware- 
house near St. Paul’s Church-yard, and its 
manufactory at Lyons, but with which John 
Fausset had no longer any connection. He 
had taken his capital out of the firm, and 
had cleansed himself from the stain of com- 
mercial dealings before he married the Hon- 
orable Maud Donfrey, third daughter of 
Lord Castle-Counell. 

Miss Donfrey had given herself very will- 
ingly to the commoner, albeit he was her 
senior by more than twenty years, and in 
her own deprecating description of him, was 


4 


THE FATAL THREE. 


quite out of her set. She liked him not a 
little for his own sake, and for the power his 
strong will exercised over her own weaker 
nature, hut she liked him still better for the 
sake of wealth, which seemed unlimited. 

She was nineteen at the time of her mar- 
riage, and she had been married nine years. 
Those years had brought the Honorable Mrs. 
Fausset only one child, the seven-year-old 
daughter playing about the room in the twi- 
light, and maternity had offered very little 
hinderance to the lady’s pleasures as a wom- 
an of fashion. She had been indulged to the 
uttermost by a fond and admiring husband; 
and now, for the first time in his life, John 
Fausset had occasion to ask his wife a favor, 
which was not granted too readily. It must 
be owned that the favor was not a small one, 
involving nothing less than the adoption of 
an orphan girl in whose fate Mr. Fausset was 
interested. 

“ It is very dreadful,” sighed Mrs. Fausset, 
as if she were speaking of an earthquake. 

‘ ‘ We have been -so happy alone together — 
you, and I, and Mildred.” 

“Yes, dearest, when we have been alone, 
which you will admit has not been very 
often.” 

“Oh, but visitors do not count; they go 
and come. They don’t belong to us; this 
dreadful girl will be one of us — or she will 
expect to be. I feel as if the golden circlet 
of home-life were going to be broken.” 

“ Not broken, Maud, only expanded.” 

“Oh, but you can’t expand it by letting 
in a stranger. Had the mother no people of 
her own; no surroundings whatever; nobody 
but you who could be appealed to for this 
wretched girl?” inquired Mrs. Fausset, fan- 
ning herself wearily, as she lolled back in her 
low chair. 

She was dressed in a loose cream-colored 
gown of softest silk and Indian embroidery, 
and there were diamond stars trembling 
among her feathery golden hair. The flow- 
ing garment in which she had dined alone 
with her husband was to be changed pres- 
ently for white satin and tulle, in which she 
was to appear at three evening parties; but 
in the mean time, having for once in a way 
dined at home, she considered her mode of 
life intensely domestic. 

The seven-year-old daughter was roaming 
about with her doll, sometimes in one draw- 


ing-room, sometimes in another — there were 
three opening into one another — the inner- 
most room half conservatory, shadowy with 
palms and tropical ferns. Mildred was enjoy- 
ing herself in the quiet way of children accus- 
tomed to play alone, looking at the pretty 
things upon the various tables, peering in at 
the old china figures in the cabinets, the 
ridiculous Chelsea shepherd and shepherd- 
ess; the Chelsea lady in hawking costume, 
with a falcon upon her wrist; the absurd 
lambs, and more absurd foliage, and the Bow 
and Battersea, ladies and gentlemen, with 
their blunt features and coarse complexions. 
Mildred w'as quite happy prowling about, 
and looking at things in silent wonder; turn- 
ing over the leaves of illustrated books, and 
lifting the lids of gold and enamelled boxes; 
trying to find out the uses and meanings of 
things. Sometimes she came back to the 
front drawing-room and seated herself on a 
stool at her mother’s feet, solemnly listening 
to the conversation, following it much more 
earnestly, and comprehending it much better 
than either her father or mother would have 
supposed possible. 

To stop up after nine o’clock was an un- 
wonted joy for Mildred, who went to bed 
ordinarily at seven. The privilege had been 
granted in honor of the rare occasion, a tete- 
d-tete dinner in the height of the London 
season. 

“ Is there no one else who could take her?” 
repeated Mrs. Fausset, impatiently, finding 
that her husband took a long time to answer. 

“There is really no one else upon whom 
the poor child has any claim.” 

“Cannot she remain at school? You could 
pay for her schooling, of course. I should 
not mind that.” 

This was generous in a lady who had 
brought her husband a nominal five thou- 
sand pounds, and who spent his money as 
freely as if it had been water. 

“ She cannot remain at school. She is a 
kind of girl who cannot get on at school. 
She needs home influences.” 

“You mean that she is a horrid rebellious 
girl who has been expelled from a school, 
and whom I am to take because nobody else 
will have her?” 

“You are unjust and ungenerous, Maud. 
The girl has not been expelled. She is a girl 
of peculiar temper, and very strong feelings, 


THE FATAL THREE. 


and she is unhappy amid the iey formalities 
of an unexeeptionable school. Perhaps had 
she been sent to some struggling school-mis- 
tress in a small way of business she might 
have been happier. At any rate she is not 
^^PPy> as her parents — dead and gone — 
were friends of mine in the past, I should like 
to make her girlhood happy, and to see her 
well married if I can.” 

But are there not plenty of other people 
in the world who would do all you want if 
you paid them. I’m sure I should not grudge 
the money.” 

“ It is not a question of money. The girl 
has money of her own. She is an heiress.” 

“ Then she is a ward in Chancery, I sup- 
pose. ” 

“ No, she is my ward. I am her sole trus- 
tee.” 

“And you really want to have her here in 
our own house, and at The Hook, too, I sup- 
pose. Always with us wherever we go.” 

“ That is what I want — until she marries. 
She will be twenty in five years, and in all 
probability she will marry before she is twen- 
ty. It is not a life-long sacrifice that I am 
asking from you, Maud, and, remember, it is 
the first favor I have ever asked'you.” 

“Let the little girl come, mother,” plead- 
ed Mildred, clambering on to her mother’s 
knee. 

She had been sitting with her head bent 
over her doll, and her hair falling forward 
over her face like golden rain, for the last ten 
minutes. Mrs. Fausset had no suspicion that 
the child had been listening, and this sudden 
appeal was startling to the last degree. 

“Wisdom has spoken from my darling’s 1 


5 

rosy lips,” said Fausset, coming over to the 
window and stooping to kiss his child. 

“ Mj’^ dear John, you must know that your 
wish is a law to me,” replied his wife, sub- 
mitting all at once to the inevitable. ‘ ‘ If 
you are really bent upon having your ward 
here she must come.” 

“I am really bent upon it.” 

“ Then let her come as soon as you like.” 

“ I will bring her to-morrow.” 

“ And I shall have some one to play with,” 
said Mildred, in her baby voice; “I shall give 
her my second best doll.” 

“Not your best, Mildred?” asked the fa- 
ther, smiling at her. 

Mildred reflected for a few moments. 

“I’ll wait and see what she is like,” she 
said, ‘ ‘ and if she is very nice I will give her 
quite my best doll. The one you brought 
me from Paris, father. The one that walks 
and talks.” 

Maud Fausset sighed, and looked at the 
little watch dangling on her chatelaine. 

‘ ‘ A quarter to ten ! How awfully late for 
Mildred to be up. And it is time I dressed. 
I hope you are coming with me, John. Ring 
the bell, please. Come, Mildred.” 

The child kissed her father with a hearty, 
clinging kiss which meant a world of love, 
and then she picked up her doll — not the 
walking-talking machine from Paris, but a 
friendly, old-fashioned wax and bran person- 
age — and trotted out of the room, hanging on 
to her mother’s gown. 

“How sweet she is,” muttered the father, 
looking after her fondly; “and what a hap- 
py home it has been. I hope the coming of 
that other one won’t make any difference. ” 


CHAPTER 11. 

FAY. 


Mrs. Fausset’s three parties, the last of 
which was a very smart ball, kept her away 
from home until the summer sun was rising: 
above Grosvenor Square, and the cocks were 
crowing in the mews behind Upper Parch- 
ment Street. Having been so late in the 
morning, Mrs. Fausset ignored breakfast, and 
only made her appearance in time for lunch. 


when her husband came in from his ride. He 
had escorted her to the first of her parties, and 
had left her on the way to the second, to go 
and finish his evening in the house, which he 
found much more interesting than society. 

They met at luncheon, and talked of their 
previous night’s experiences, and of indiffer- 
ent matters. Not a word about the expected 


6 


THE FATAL THREE. 


presence -vvliich was so soon to disturb their 
domestic calm. Mr. Faiisset affected cheer- 
fulness, yet was evidently out of spirits. He 
looked round the picturesque old oak dining- 
room wistfully ; he strolled into the inner 
room, with its dwarf bookcases, pictures, and 
bronzes, its cosey corner behind a sixfold 
Indian screen, a century-old screen, bought 
at Christie’s out of a famous collection. He 
surveyed this temple of domestie peace, and 
wondered within himself whether it would 
be quite as peaceful when a new presence 
was among them. 

“ Surely a girl of fourteen can make no 
difference,” he argued, “even if she has a 
peculiar temper. If she is inclined to be 
troublesome, she shall be made to keep her- 
self to herself. Maud shall not be rendered 
unhappy by her.” 

He went out soon after lunch and came 
home again at afternoon tea-time in a han- 
som, with a girl in a black frock. A four- 
wdieeler followed with a large trunk and two 
smaller boxes. The splendid creatures in 
knee breeches and powder who opened the 
door had been ordered to deny their mistress 
to everybody, so Mrs. Fausset was taking tea 
alone in her morning-room. 

The morning -room occupied the whole 
front of the second floor, a beautiful room, 
with three windows, the centre a large bow, 
jutting out over empty space. This bay- 
window had been added when Mr. Fausset 
married, on a suggestion from his flancee. It 
spoiled the external appearanee of the house, 
but it made the room delightful. For furni- 
ture and decoration there was everything 
pretty, novel, eccentrie, and expensive that 
Maud Fausset had ever been able to think of. 
She had only stopped her capriees and her 
purehases when the room would not hold an- 
other thing of beauty. There was a confu- 
sion of form and color, but the general effect 
was charming; and Mrs. Fausset, in a loose 
white muslin gown, suited the room just as 
the room suited Mrs. Fausset. 

She was sitting in the bay-window, in a 
semicircle of flowers and amid the noises of 
the West End world, waiting for her husband 
and the new-comer, nervous and apprehen- 
sive. The scarlet Japanese tea - table stood 
untouched, the water bubbling in the quaint 
little bronze teakettle, swinging between a 
pair of rampant dragons. 


She started as the door opened, but kept 
her seat. She did not want to spoil the new- 
comer by an undue appearance of interest. 

John Fausset came into the room leading 
a pale girl dressed in black. She was tall 
for her age, and very thin, and her small face 
had a pinched look, which made the great 
black eyes look larger. She was a peculiar- 
looking girl, with an olive tint in her com- 
plexion which hinted at a lineage not alto- 
gether English. She was badly dressed in 
the best materials, and had a look of never 
having been much cared for since she was 
born. 

“This is Fay,” said Mr. Fausset, trying to 
be cheerful. 

His wife held out her hand, whieh the girl 
took coldly, but not shyly. She had an air 
of being perfectly self-possessed. 

“Her name is Fay, is it? What a pretty 
name! By-the-bye, you did not tell me her 
surname.” 

“Did I not? Her name is Fausset. She 
is a distant relation of my family.” 

“I did not understand that last night,” 
said Mrs. Fausset, with a puzzled air. “You 
only talked of a friend.” 

“ Was that so? I should have said a fam- 
ily connection. Yes, Fay and I are name- 
sakes, and kindred. ” 

He patted the girl’s shoulder caressingly, 
and made her sit down by the little red table 
in front of the teacups and cakes and buns. 
The buns reminded him of his daughter. 

“Where is Mildred?” 

‘ ‘ She is at her music lesson ; but she will 
be here in a minute or two, no doubt,” an- 
swered his wife. 

‘ ‘ Poor little mite, to have to begin lessons 
so soon; the chubby little Angers stuck down 
upon the cold hard keys. The piano is so 
uninviting at seven years old, such a world 
of labor for such a small effect. If she could 
turn a barrel organ, with a monkey on the 
top, I’m sure she w^ould like music ever so 
much better ; and after a year or two of grind- 
ing it would dawn upon her that there was 
something wanting in that kind of music, and 
then she would attack the piano of her own 
accord, and its difficulties would not seem so 
hopelessly uninteresting. Are you fond of 
lessons. Fay?” 

“I hate them,” answered the girl, with vin- 
dictive emphasis. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


7 


“And I suppose you hate books too,” said 
Mrs. Fausset, rather scornfully. 

“No, I love books.” 

She looked about the bright, spacious room 
curiously, with admiring eyes. People who 
came from very pretty rooms were lost in 
admiration at Mrs. Fausset’s morning-room, 
with its heterogeneous styles of art — here 
Louis Seize — there Japanese— Italian on one 
side — Turkish on the other. What a daz- 
zling etfect, then, it must needs have upon this 
girl, who had spent the last five years of her 
life amid the barren surroundings of a suburb- 
an school! 

‘ ‘ What a pretty room 1” she exclaimed at 
last. 

“Don’t you think my wife was made to 
live in pretty rooms?” asked Fausset, touch- 
ing Maud’s delicate hand as it moved among 
the tea-things. 

“ She is very pretty herself,” said Fay, 
bluntly. 

“Yes, and all things about her should be 
pretty — this thing for instance,” as Mildred 
came bounding into the room and clambered 
on her father’s knee. “This is my daughter. 
Fay, and your playfellow if you know how 
to play.” 

“I’m afraid I don’t, for they always snubbed 
us for anything like play, ’’answered the stran- 
ger, “but Mildred shall teach me if she will.” 

She had learned the child’s name from Mr. 
Fausset during the drive from ^treatham 
Common to Upper Parchment Street. 

Mildred stretched out her little hand to the 
girl in black with somewhat of a patronizing 
air. She had lived all her little life among 
bright colors and beautiful objects, in a kind 
of butterfly world, and she concluded that 
this pale girl in sombre raiment must needs 
be poor and unhappy. She looked her pret- 
tiest, smiling down at the stranger from her 
father’s shoulder, where she hung fondly. 
She looked like a cherub in a picture by Ru- 
bens, red lipped, with eyes of azure, and flax- 
en hair just touched with gold, and a com- 
plexion of dazzling lily and carnation color 
suffused with light. 

“ I mean to give you my very best doll,” 
she said. 

“You darling, how I shall adore you!” 
cried the strange girl, impulsively, rising from 
her seat at the tea-table, and clasping Mildred 
in her arms. 


“That is as it should be,” said Fausset, 
patting Fay’s shoulder affectionately. “Let 
there be a bond of love between you two.” 

“And will you play with me, and learn 
your lessons with me, and sleep in my room?” 
, asked Mildred, coaxingly. 
i “No, darling. Fay will have a room of 
her own,” said Mrs. Fausset, replying to the 
last inquiry. “It is much nicer for girls to 
have rooms to themselves.” 

“No, it isn’t,” answered Mildred, with a 
touch of petulance that was pretty in so love- 
ly a child. “ I want Fay to sleep with me. 
I want her to tell me stories every night.” 

“You have mother to tell you stories, Mil- 
dred,” said Mrs. Fausset, already inclined to 
be jealous. 

“Not every night. Mother goes to parties 
almost' every night.” 

“Not at The Hook, love.” 

“Oh, but at The Hook there’s always com- 
pany. Why can’t I have Fay to tell me stories 
every night?” urged the child, persistently. 

“I don’t see why they should not be 
together, Maud,” said Mr. Fausset, always 
prone to indulge Mildred’s lightest whim. 

“ It is better that Fay should have a room 
of her own for a great many reasons,” replied 
his wife, with a look of displeasure. 

“Very well, Maud, so be it,” he answered, 
evidently desiring to conciliate her. “And 
which room is Fay to have?” 

“ I have given her Bell’s room.” 

Mr. Fausset’s countenance fell. 

“Bell’s room— a servant’s room” — he re- 
peated, blankly. 

“It is very inconvenient for Bell, of 
course,” said Mrs. Fausset. “ She will have 
to put up an extra bed in the house-maid’s 
room; and as she has always been used to a 
room of her own, she made herself rather dis- 
agreeable about the change.” 

Mr. Fausset was silent, and seemed thought- 
ful. Mildred had pulled Fay away from the 
table and led her to a distant window, where 
a pair of Virginian love-birds were twittering 
in their gilded cage, half hidden amid the 
bank of feathery white spirea and yellow 
marguerites which filled the recess. 

“ I should like to see the room,” said Faus- 
set, presently, when his wife had put down 
her teacup. 

“My dear John, why should you trouble 
yourself about such a detail?” 


8 


THE FATAL THREE. 


I want to do my duty to the girl— if I 
can.” 

“I think you might trust such a small 
matter to me, or even to my house-keeper,” 
Maud Fausset answered, with an offended air. 
^‘However, you are quite at liberty to make 
a personal inspection. Bell is very particu- 
lar, and any room she occupied is sure to be 
nice. But you can judge for yourself. The 
room is on the same floor as Mildred’s.” 

This last remark implied that to occupy 
any apartment on that floor must be a priv- 
ilege. 

“But not with the same aspect.” 

“Isn’t it? No, I suppose not. The win- 
dows look the other w'ay, ” said Mrs. Fausset, 
innocently. 

She was not an over-educated person. She 
adored Keats, Shelley, and Browning, and 
talked about them learnedly in a way; but 
she hardly knew the points of the compass. 

She sauntered out of the room, a picture 
of languid elegance in her flowing muslin 
gown. There were flowers on the landing, 
and a scarlet Japanese screen to fence off the 
stairs that went downward, and an embroid- 
ered Algerian curtain to hide the upward 
flight. This second floor was Mrs. Fausset’s 
domain. Her bedroom and bath-room and 
dressing-room were all on this floor. Mr. 
Fausset lived there also, but seemed to be 
there on sufferance. 

She pulled aside the Algerian curtain, and 
they went up to the third story. The two 
front rooms were Mildred’s bedroom and 
school-room. The bedroom door was open, 
an airy room with two windows brightened 
by outside flower - boxes, full of gaudy red 
geraniums and snow-white marguerites, a 
gay -looking room with a pale blue paper, 
and a blue and cream color carpet. A little 
brass bed with lace curtains for Mildred — 
a brass bed without curtains for Mildred’s 
maid. 

The house was like many old London 
houses, more spacious than it looked outside. 
There were four or five small rooms at the 
back occupied by servants, and it was one ' 
of those rooms, a very small room looking 
into a mews, which Mr, Fausset went to in- 
spect. 

It was not a delightful room. There was 
an outside wall at right angles with the one 


window which shut off the glory of the west- 
ering sun. There was a forest of chimney- 
pots by way of prospect. There was not 
even a flower-box to redeem the dinginess of 
the outlook. The furniture was neat, and 
the room was spotlessly clean ; but as much 
might be said of a cell in Portland prison. 
A narrow iron bedstead, a couple of cane 
chairs, a common mahogany chest of drawers 
in the window, and on the chest of drawers 
a white toilet cover, and a small mahogany 
looking-glass. A deal wash-stand and a zinc 
bath. These are not luxurious surroundings; 
and Mr. Fausset’s countenance did not ex- 
press approval. 

“I’m sure it is quite as nice a room as 
she would have at any boarding-school,” 
said his wife, answering that disapproving 
look. 

“Perhaps; but I want her to feel as if 
she were not at school, but at home.” 

“ She can have a prettier room at The Hook, 

1 1 dare say, though we are short of bedrooms 
even there — if she is to go to The Hook with 
us.” 

“Why, of course she is to go with us. She 
is to live with us till she marries.” 

Mrs. Fausset sighed, and looked profound- 
ly melancholy. 

“I don’t think we shall get her married 
very easily,” she said. 

“Why not?” asked her husband, quickly, 
looking at her anxiously as he spoke. 

“ She is so remarkably plain.” 

“ Did she strike you so? I think her rath- 
er pretty, or at least interesting. She has 
magnificent eyes.” 

“ So has an owl in an ivy bush,” exclaimed 
Mrs. Fausset, petulantly. “Those great, 
black eyes, in that small pale face, are posi- 
tively repulsive. However, I don’t want to 
depreciate her. She is of your kith and kin, 
and you are interested in her, so we must do 
the best we can. I only hope Mildred will 
get on with her.” 

This conversation took place upon the 
stairs. Mr. Fausset was at the morning-room 
door by this time. He opened it, and saw 
his daughter in the sunlit window among 
the flowers, with her arm round Fay’s neck. 

“They have begun very well,” he said. 

“Children are so capricious,” answered 
his wife. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


0 


CHAPTER III. 

A SUPERIOR PERSON. 


Mildred and her father’s ward got on re- 
markably well, perhaps a little too well to 
please Mrs. Fausset, who had been jealous 
of the new-comer, and resentful of her intru- 
sion from the outset. Mildred did not show 
herself capricious in her treatment of her 
playfellow. The child had never had a young 
companion before, and to her the advent of 
Fay meant the beginning of a brighter life. 

[ Until Fay came there had been no one but 
mother; and mother spent her life in visit- 
ing and receiving visits. Only the briefest 
intervals between a ceaseless round of gay- 
I eties could be atforded to Mildred. Her 
mother doted on her, or thought she did; 

I but she had allowed her life to be caught in 
i the cogs of the great society wheel, and she 
was obliged to go round with the wheel. So 
far as brightly furnished rooms and an ex- 
pensive morning governess, ever so much too 
clever for the pupil’s requirements, and cost- 
ly toys and pretty frocks and carriage drives, 
could go, Mildred was a child in an earthly 
paradise; but there are some children who 
yearn for something more than luxurious sur- 
roundings and fine clothes, and Mildred 
Fausset was one of those. Slie wanted a 
great deal of love, she wanted love always, 
not in brief snatches, as her mother gave it, 
hurried cares.ses given in the midst of dress- 
ing for a ball, hasty kisses before stepping 
into her carriage to be whisked off to a gar- 
den-party, or in all the pomp and splendor 
of ostrich feathers, diamonds, and court 
train, before the solemn function of a draw- 
ing-room. Such passing glimpses of love 
were not enough for Mildred. She wanted 
warm affections interwoven with the fabric 
of her life, she wanted loving companionship 
from morning till night; and this she had 
from Fay. From the first moment of their 
clasping hands the two girls had loved each 
other. Each sorely in need of love, they had 
come together naturally, and with all the 
force of free, undisciplined nature, meeting 
and mingling like two rivers. 


John Fausset saw their affection and was 
delighted. That loving union between the 
girl and the child seemed to solve all difficul- 
ties. Fay was no longer a stranger. She 
was a part of the family, merged in the gold- 
en circle of domestic love. Mrs. Fausset 
looked on with jaundiced eye. 

“If one could only believe it were genu- 
ine!” she sighed. 

“Genuine! which of them do you sup- 
pose is pretending? Not Mildred, surely?” 

“Mildred! No, indeed! She is truth it- 
self.” 

“Why do you suspect Fay of falsehood?” 

“My dear John, I fear — I only say I fear 
— that your protegee is sly. She has a quiet, 
self-contained air that I don’t like in one so 
young.” 

“I don’t wonder she is self-contained. 
You do so little to draw her out.” 

“Her attachment to Mildred has an ex- 
aggerated air — as if she wanted to curry 
favor with us by pretending to be fond of 
our child,” said Mrs. Fausset, ignoring her 
husband’s remark. 

“Why should she curry favor? She is 
not here as a dependent — though she is made 
to wear the look of one sometimes more than 
I like. I have told you that her future is 
provided for; and, as for pretending to be 
fond of Mildred, she is the last girl to pre- 
tend affection. She would have been better 
liked at school if she had been capable of 
pretending. There is a wild, undisciplined 
nature under that self-contained air you talk 
about.” 

“There is a very bad temper, if that is 
what you mean. Bell has complained to me 
more than once on that subject. ” 

“I hope you have not set Bell in author- 
ity over her,” exclaimed Mr. Fausset, has- 
tily. 

‘ ‘ There must be some one to maintain 
order when Miss Colville is away. ” 

“That some one should be you or I, not 
Bell.” 


10 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“Bell is a conscientious person, and she 
would make no improper use of authority.” 

“ She is a very disagreeable person. That 
is all I know about her, ” retorted Mr. Faus- 
set, as he left the room. 

He was dissatisfied with Fay’s position in 
the house, yet hardly knew how to' complain 
or what alteration to suggest. There were 
no positive wrongs to resent. Fay shared 
Mildred’s studies and amusements; they had 
their meals together, and took their airings 
together. 

When Mildred went down to the morning- 
room or the drawing-room Fay generally 
went with her; generally, not always. There 
were times when Bell looked in at the school- 
room door and beckoned Mildred. “Mam- 
ma wants you alone,” she would whisper on 
the threshold, and Mildred ran off to be 
petted and paraded before some privileged 
visitor. 

There were differences which Fay felt 
keenly and inwardly resented. She was al- 
lowed to sit aloof when the drawing-room was 
full of fine ladies, upon Mrs. Fausset’s after- 
noon, while Mildred was brought into notice 
and talked about, her little graces exhibited 
and expatiated upon, or her childish tastes 
conciliated. Fay would sit looking at one 
of the art books piled upon a side-table, or 
turning over photographs and prints in a 
portfolio. She never talked unless spoken 
to, or did anything to put herself forward. 

Sometimes an officious visitor would no- 
tice her. 

“ What a clever -looking girl ! Who is 
she?” asked a prosperous dowager, whose 
own daughters were all planted out in life, 
happy wives and mothers, and who could 
afford to interest herself in stray members 
of the human race. 

“ She is a ward of my husband’s — Miss 
Fausset.” 

“Indeed. A cousin, I suppose?” 

“Hardly so near as that. A distant con- 
nection.” 

Mrs. Fausset’s tone expressed a wish not 
to be bored by the clever -looking girl’s 
praises. People soon perceived that Miss 
Fausset was to be taken no more notice of 
than a piece of furniture. She was there for 
some reason known to Mr. and Mrs. Fausset, 
but she was not there because she was want- 
ed — except by Mildred. Everybody could 


see that Mildred wanted her. Mildred would 
run to her as she sat apart, and clamber on 
her knee, and hang upon her, and whisper 
and giggle with her, and warm the statue 
into life. Mildred would carry her tea and 
cakes, and make a loving fuss about her in 
spite of all the world. 

Bell was a power in the house in Upper 
Parchment Street. She was that kind of old 
servant who is as bad as a mother-in-law, 
perhaps worse; for your mother-in-law is a 
lady by breeding and education, and is in 
somewise governed by reason, while your 
trustworthy old servant is apt to be a creat- 
ure of impulse influenced only by feeling. 
Bell was a woman of strong feelings, devot- 
edly attached to Mrs. Fausset. 

Twenty-seven years ago, when Maud Don- 
frey was an infant, Martha Bell was the 
young wife of the head gardener at Castle- 
Connell. The gardener and his wife lived 
at one of the lodges, near the bank of the 
Shannon, and were altogether superior peo- 
ple for their class. Martha had been a lace- 
maker at Limerick, and w^as fairly educated. 
Patrick Bell was less refined, and had no 
ideas beyond his garden; but he was honest, 
sober, and thoroughly respectable. He sel- 
dom read the newspapers, and had never 
heard of Home Rule or the three F’s. 

Their first child died within three weeks 
of its birth, and a wet nurse being wanted 
at the great house for Lady Castle-Connell’s 
seventh baby, Mrs. Bell was chosen as alto- 
gether the best person for that confidential 
office. She went to live at the great white 
house in the beautiful gardens near the 
river. It was only a temporary separation, 
she told Patrick; and Patrick took courage 
at the thought that his wife would return to 
him as soon as Lady Castle-Connell’s daugh- 
ter was weaned, while in the mean time he 
was to enjoy the privilege of seeing her every 
Sunday afternoon; but somehow it happen- 
ed that Martha Bell never went back to the 
commonly furnished little rooms in the lodge 
or to the coarse-handed husband. 

Martha Bell was a woman of strong feel- 
ings. She grieved passionately for her dead 
baby, and she took the stranger’s child re- 
luctantly to her aching breast. But babies 
have a way of getting themselves loved, and 
one baby will creep into the place of another 


THE FATAL THREE. 


11 


unawares. Before Mrs. Bell had been at the 
great house three months she idolized her 
nursling. By the time she had been there 
a year she felt that life would be unbearable 
without her foster-child. Fortunately for 
her she seemed as necessary to the child as 
the child was to her. Maud was delicate, 
fragile, lovely, and evanescent of aspect. 
Lady Donfrey had lost two out of her brood, 
partly, she feared, from carelessness in the 
nursery. Bell was devoted to her charge, 
and Bell was entreated to remain for a year 
or two at least. 

Bell consented to remain for a year; she 
became accustomed to the plenty and the 
refinements of a nobleman’s house, she hated 
the lodge, and she cared very little for her 
husband. It was a relief to her when Pat- 
rick Bell sickened of his empty cottage and 
took it into his head to emigrate to Canada, 
where he had brothers and sisters settled al- 
ready. He and his wife parted in the friend- 
liest spirit, with some ideas of reunion years 
hence, when the Honorable Maud should 
have outgrown the need of a nurse. Mrs. 
Bell lived at the great white house until 
Maud Donfrey left Castle - Connell as the 
bride of John Fausset. She went before her 
mistress to the house in Upper Parchment 
Street, and was there when the husband and 
wife arrived after their continental honey- 
moon. From that hour she remained in 
possession at The Hook, Surrey, or at Upper 
Parchment Street, or at any temporary abode 
by sea or lake. Bell was always a power 
in Mrs. Fausset’s life, ruling over the other 
servants, dictating and fault-finding in a 
quiet, respectful way, discovering the weak 
side of everybody’s character, and getting 
to the bottom of everybody’s history. The 
servants hated her, and bowed down before 
her. Mrs. Fausset was fond of her as a part 
of her own childhood, remembering that 
great love which had watched through all 
her infantine illnesses and delighted in all 
her childish joys. Yet even despite these 
fond associations, there were times when 
Maud Fausset thought that it would be a 
good thing if dear old Bell would accept a 
liberal pension and go and live in some 
rose and honeysuckle cottage among the 
summery meadows by the Thames. Mrs. 
Fausset had seen that river -side region 
only in summer, and she had hardly realized 


the stern fact of winter in that district. 
She never thought of rheumatism in connec- 
tion with one of those low white-walled cot- 
tages, half hidden under overhanging thatch- 
ed gables and curtained with woodbine and 
passion-fiower, rose and myrtle. Dear old 
Bell was forty-eight, straight as a ramrod, 
very thin, with sharp features, and quick, 
eager gray eyes, under bushy iron - gray 
brows. She had thick, iron -gray hair, and 
she never wore a cap. That was one of her 
privileges, and a mark of demarcation be- 
tween her and the other servants; that and 
her afternoon gown of black silk or satin. 

She had no specific duties in the house, 
but had something to say about everything. 
Mrs. Fausset’s French maid and Mildred’s 
German maid were at one in their detesta- 
tion of Bell; but both were eminently civil 
to that authority. 

From the hour of Fay’s advent in Upper 
Parchment Street Bell had set her face 
against her. In the first place, she had not 
been taken into Mr. and Mrs. Fausset’s confi- 
dence about the girl. She had not been con- 
sulted or appealed to in any way; and, in 
the second place, she had not been told that 
her bedroom would be wanted for the new- 
comer, and that she must henceforward share 
a room with one of the house-maids, an in 
dignity which this superior person keenly 
felt. 

♦ Nor did Fay do anything to conciliate 
this domestic authority. Fay disliked Bell 
as heartily as Bell disliked Fay. She re- 
fused all otfers of service from the confiden- 
tial servant, and when Bell offered to help in 
unpacking her boxes — perhaps with some 
idea of peering into those details of a girl’s 
possessions which in themselves constitute a 
history — Fay declined her help curtly and 
shut the door in her face. 

Bell had sounded her mistress, but had 
obtained the scantiest information from that 
source. A distant connection of Mr. Faus- 
set’s — his ward — an heiress. Not one detail 
beyond this could Bell extract from her mis- 
tress, who hfid never kept a secret from her. 
Evidently Mrs. Fausset knew no more. 

“I must say, ma’am, that for an heiress 
the child has been sadly neglected,” Bell told 
her mistress. “Her under-linen was all at 
sixes and sevens till I took it in hand, and 
she came to this house with her left boot 


12 


THE FATAL THREE. 


worn down at heel. Her drawers are stuffed 
with clothes, but many of them are out of 
repair, and she is such a wilful young lady 
that she will hardly let me touch her things.” 

Bell had a habit of emphasizing personal 
pronouns that referred to herself. 

“You must do whatever you think proper 
about her clothes, whether she likes it or 
not,” answered Mrs. Fausset, standing before 
her glass and giving final touches to the 
feathery, golden hair which her maid had ar- 
ranged a few minutes before. “ If she wants 
new things you can buy them for her from 
any of my tradespeople. Mr. Fausset says 
she is to be looked after in every way. You 
had better not go to Bond Street for her un- 
der-linen. Oxford Street will do; and you 
need not go to Stephanie for her hats. She 
is such a very plain girl that it would be ab- 
surd — cruel even — to dress her like Mildred.” 

“Yes, indeed, it would, ma’am,” assented 
Bell, and then she pursued, musingly, “If 
it was a good school she was at, all I can say 


is that the wardrobe-woman was a very queer 
person to send any pupil away with her 
linen in such a neglected state. And as for 
her education. Miss Colville says she is 
shockingly backward. Miss Mildred knows 
more geography and more grammar than 
that great overgrown girl of fourteen.” 

Mrs. Fausset sighed. 

“Yes, Bell, she has evidently been neg- 
lected ; but her education matters very little. 
It is her disposition I am anxious about.” 

“Ah, ma’am, and so am sighed Bell. 

When Bell had withdrawn, Maud Fausset 
sat in front of her dressing-table in a reverie. 
She forgot to put on her bonnet, or to ring 
for her maid, though she had been told the 
carriage was waiting, and although she was 
due at a musical recital in ten minutes. She 
sat there lost in thought, while the horses 
jingled their bits impatiently in the street 
below. 

“Yes, there is a mystery,” she said to her- 
self; “everybody sees it, even Bell.” 


CHAPTER IV. 

ALL SHE COULD REMEMBER. 


The London season was waning, and fewer 
carriages rolled westward to the Park gates 
in the low sunlight of late afternoon, and 
fewer riders trotted eastward towards Gros- 
venor Square in the brighter sunshine be- 
fore luncheon. Town was gay still, but the 
flood-tide of gayety was over. The river of 
London life was on the ebb, and people were 
beginning to talk about grouse moors in Scot- 
land and sulphur springs in Germany. 

Fay had lived in Upper Parchment Street 
nearly two months. It seemed to her impa- 
tient spirit as if she had lived there half a 
lifetime. The life would have been hateful 
to her without Mildred’s love. That made 
amends for a good deal, but it could not 
make amends for everything; not for Bell’s 
quiet insolence, for instance. 

Bell had replenished the alien’s wardrobe. 
Everything she had bought was of excellent 
quality and expensive after its kind; but had 
a prize been offered for bad taste, Bell would 
have taken it by her selections of raiment on 


this occasion. Not once did she allow Fay 
to have a voice in the matter. 

“Mrs. Fausset deputed me to choose the 
things, miss,” she said, “and I hope I know 
my duty.” 

“ I suppose I am very ugly,” said Pay, re- 
signedly, as she contemplated her small feat- 
ures in the glass, overshadowed by a mush- 
room hat of coarse brown straw, with a big 
brown ribbon bow, “but in this hat I look 
positively hideous. ” 

The hat was an excellent hat, that good 
coarse Dunstable, which costs money, and 
wears forever, the ribbon of the best quality; 
but Hebe herself would have looked plain 
under a hat shaped like a bell-glass. 

Fay’s remark was recorded to Mrs. Faus- 
set as the sign of a discontented spirit. 

Not being able to learn anything about 
Fay’s history from her mistress. Bell had 
tried to obtain a little light from the girl her- 
self, but without avail. Questioned about 
her school, Pay had replied that she hated 


THE FATAL THREE. 


13 


her school, and didn’t want to talk of it. 
Questioned about her mother, she answered 
that her mother’s name was too sacred to be 
spoken about with any stranger; and on a 
subtle attempt to obtain intelligence about 
her father, the girl flushed crimson, started 
up angrily from her chair, and told the 
highly respectable Bell that she was not in 
the habit of chattering to servants, or being 
questioned by them. 

After this it was war to the knife on Mar- 
tha Bell’s part. 

Miss Colville, the expensive morning gov- 
erness, was in somewise above prejudice, 
and was a person of liberal mind for a gov- 
erness who had lived all her life in other 
people’s houses, looking on at lives of fash- 
ionable frivolity in which she had no share, 
who had been obliged to study Debrett’s 
annual volume as if it were her Bible lest 
she shoidd commit herself in every other 
speech, so intricate are the ramifications and 
interweavings of the British nobility^ and 
county families. Miss Colville was not un- 
kind to Fay Fausset, and was conscientious 
in her instructions; but even she resented 
the mystery of the girl’s existence, and felt 
that her presence blemished the respectabil- 
ity of the household. By-and-by, when she 
should be seeking new employment, and 
should have occasion to refer to Mrs. Faus- 
set, and to talk of her pupils in Upper Parch- 
ment Street, there would be a difficulty in 
accounting for Fay— a ward of Mr. Faus- 
set’s, a distant connection ! The whole thing 
sounded improbable. An heiress who had 
come to the house with torn embroidery 
upon her under-linen. A mystery; yes, no 
doubt, a mystery. And in Miss Colville’s 
ultra-particular phase of life no manner of 
mystery was considered respectable. 

In spite of these drawbacks, Miss Colville 
was fairly kind to her new charge. Fay was 
backward in grammar and geography; she 
was a dullard about science, but she could 
chatter French, she knew a little Italian, and 
in music she was highly gifted. In this she 
resembled Mildred, who adored music, and 
had taken her first lessons on the piano as a 
water-fowl takes to a pond, joyously, as to 
her native element. Fay was not advanced 
in the technique of the art, but she played 
and sang charmingly, for the most part by 
ear; and she used to play and sing to Mil- 


dred in the summer twilight, till Bell came 
like a prison-warder and insisted upon Mil- 
dred’s going to bed. 

“I nursed your mamma, miss,” she would 
say, “and I never allowed her to spoil her 
complexion with late hours, as Miss Fay is 
leading you on to do.” 

At seven Mildred neither cared for health 
nor complexion in the abstract, and she 
loved Fay’s music and Fay’s stories. Fay 
would tell her a fairy tale, with musical ac- 
companiments improvised to suit the story. 

I This was Beauty’s father groping through 
the dark wood. Then came the swaying of 
branches, the rustling of summer leaves, the 
long, long sigh of the night-wind; the hoot 
of the owl, and the roll of distant thunder. 
Here came Fatima’s brothers to the rescue, 
with a triumphant march and the trampling 
of fiery steeds, careering up and down the 
piano in double arpeggios, bureting open the 
gates of Bluebeard’s castle with a volley of 
tremendous chords. 

“/ never heard any one make such a noise 
on the piano,” said Bell, bristling with in- 
dignation. 

At eight o’clock Fay’s day and evening 
were done. Mildred vanished like the set- 
ting of the sun. She would like to have had 
Fay to sit beside her bed and tell her stories, 
and talk to her till she dropped asleep, but this 
happiness was sternly interdicted by Bell. 

‘ ‘ She would keep you awake half the 
night. Miss Mildred, over-exciting you with 
her stories, and what would your pa and the 
doctors say to me.?” exclaimed Bell. 

The door of the bright, pretty bedchamber 
closed upon Mildred, and Fay went back to 
the school-room heavy of heart to enjo}’' the 
privilege of sitting up by herself till half-past 
nine, a privilege conceded to superior years. 
In that hour and a half of utter loneliness 
the girl had leisure to contemplate the soli- 
tude of her friendless life. Take Mildred 
from her and she had no one — nothing. Mr. 
Fausset had meant to be kind to her, per- 
haps. He had talked very kindly to her in 
the long drive from Streatham. He had 
promised her a home and the love of kin- 
dred; but evil influences had come in his 
way, and he had given her — ^Bell. Perhaps 
she was of a jealous, exacting disposition — 
for, fondly as she loved Mildred, she could 
not help comparing Mildred’s lot with her 


14 


THE FATAL THREE. 


own; Mildred’s bright, airy room and flower- 
decked windows, looking over the tree-tops 
in the Park, with her dingy cell overlook- 
ing smoky chimneys, and tainted with odors 
of stables and kitchen ; Mildred’s butterfly 
sashes of lace and muslin, with the substan- 
tial ugliness of her own attire ; Mildred’s 
manifold possessions — trinkets, toys, books, 
games, pictures, and flowers — with her empty 
dressing-table and unadorned walls. 

“At your age white frocks would be ridic- 
ulous,” said Bell; yet Fay saw other girls of 
her age flaunting in white muslin all that 
summer through. 

Sometimes the footman forgot to bring her 
lamp, and she would sit in the school-room 
window, looking down into the street, and 
watching the carriages roll by in endless pro- 
cession, with their lamps flaming in the pale 
gray night, carrying their freight to balls and 
parties, hurrying from pleasure to pleasure 
on swift - revolving wheels. A melancholy 
hour this for the longing heart of youth, even 
when the school-giiTs future participation in 
all these pleasures is a certainty, or contingent 
only upon life; but what was it for this girl, 
who had all girlhood’s yearnings for pleasure 
and excitement, and who knew not if that 
sparkling draught would ever touch her lips, 
who felt herself an alien in this fine house — 
a stranger at this fashionable end of the 
town? It was no new thing for her to sit 
alone in the twilight, a prey to melancholy 
thoughts. Ever since she could remem- 
ber, her life had been solitary and loveless. 
The home ties and tender associations which 
sweeten other lives were unknown to her. 
She had never known what love meant 
till she felt Mildred’s warm arms clinging 
round her neck, and Mildred’s soft cheek 
pressed against hers. Her life had been a 
shifting scene peopled with strangers. Dim 
and misty memories of childhood’s earliest 
dawn conjured up a cottage garden on a 
windy hill ; the sea stretching far away in 
the distance, bright and blue, but unattaina- 
ble; a patch of grass on one side, a patch of 
potatoes on the other; a bed of wallflowers 
and stocks and yellow marigolds in front of 
the parlor window, a family of hens and an 
arrogant and ferocious cock strutting in the 
foreground ; and, standing out sharply against 
the sky and the se% a tall columa gurijjounted 
hy a statue. 


How she had longed to get nearer that vast 
expanse of water to find out what the sea 
was like! From some points in the view it 
seemed so near, almost as if she could touch 
it with her out-stretched hands; from other 
points it looked so far away. She used to 
stand on a wall behind the cottage and watch 
the white-sailed boats going out to sea, and 
the steamers with their trailing smoke melt- 
ing and vanishing on the horizon. 

‘ ‘ Where do they go?” she asked in her baby 
French. “Where do they go?” 

Those were the first words she remembered 
speaking, and nobody seemed ever to have 
answered that eager question. 

No one had cared for her in those days. 
She was very sure of that, looking back upon 
that monotonous childhood, a long series of 
empty hours in a cottage garden, and with 
no companions except the fowls, and no voice 
except that of the cow in the meadow hard 
by — a cow which sent forth meaningless bel- 
lows occasionally, and which she feared as if 
it had been a lion. 

There was a woman in a white cap whom 
she called Nounou, and who seemed too busy 
to care about anybody — a woman who did all 
I the house-work and dug the potato garden, 

! and looked after the fowls, and milked the 
cow and made butter, and rode to market on 
a donkey once or twice a week — a woman 
who was always in a hurry. There was a 
man who came home from work at sundown, 
and there were two boys in blouses and sabots, 
the youngest of whom was too old to play 
with the nurse-child. Long summer days in 
the chalky garden, long hours of listless mo- 
notony in front of the wide bright sea, had 
left a sense of oppression upon Fay’s mind. 
She did not know even the name of the town 
she had seen far below the long ridge of 
chalky hill— a town of tall white houses and 
domes and spires, which had seemed a vast 
metropolis to the eyes of infancy. She had 
but to shut her eyes in her evening solitude, 
and she could conjure up the picture of roofs 
and spires and hill and sea, and the tall col- 
umn in its railed enclosure— yet she knew no 
more of town or hill than that they were on 
the other side of the Channel. 

She remembered lying in a narrow little 
bed that rocked desperately, on a windy day, 
and looking out at the white sea-foam dash- 
ing against a curious oval window like a gi- 


THE FATAL THREE. 


15 


ant’s eye ; and then she remembered her first 
wondering experience of railway travelling; 
a train flashing past green fields and hop gar- 
dens and houses ; and then darkness and the 
jolting of a cab; and after that being carried 
lialf asleep into a strange house, and waking 
to find herself in a strange room, all very 
clean and neat, with a white - curtained bed 
and white muslin window - curtains, and on 
looking out of the window, behold, there was 
a patch of common all abloom with yellow 
furze. 

She remembered dimly that she had trav- 
elled in the charge of a little gray-haired man, 
who disappeared after the journey. She 
found herself now in the care of an elderly 
lady, very prim and strict, but not absolutely 
unkind, who wore a silk gown and a gold 
watch at her waistband, and who talked in 
an unknown tongue. Everything here was 
prettier than in Nounou’s house, and there 
was a better garden— a garden where there 
were more flowers and no potatoes — and 
there was the common in the front of the 
garden, all hillocks and hollows, where she 
was allowed to amuse herself in charge of a 
ruddy-faced girl in a lavender cotton frock. 

The old lady taught her the unknown 
tongue, which she discovered in time to be 
English, and a good deal besides — reading 
and writing, for instance, and the rudiments 
of music, a little arithmetic, grammar, and 
geography. She took kindly to music and 
reading, and she liked to dabble with ink; 
but the other lessons were abhorrent, and 
she gave the orderly old lady a good deal of 
trouble. There was no love between them, 
only endurance on either side; and the long 
days on the common were almost as desolate 
as the days on the chalk}" hill above the sea. 

At last there came a change. The dress- 
maker sent home three new frocks, all un- 
compromisingly ugly ; the little old gray- 
haired man reappeared, looking exactly as 
he had looked on board the steamer, and a 
fly carried Fay and this guardian to the rail- 
way-station on the common, and thence the 
train took them to a great dark city, which 
the man told Fay was London ; and then 
they went in a cab through streets that seem- 
ed endless, till at last the streets melted into 
a wide high-road, with trees on either side, 
and the cab drove into a garden of shining 
laurels and rhododendrons, and pulled up 


before a classic portico. Fay had no mem- 
ory of any house so grand as this, although 
it was only the conventional suburban villa 
of sixty or seventy years ago. 

Just at first the change seemed delightful. 
That circular carriage-sweep, those shining 
shrubberies with great rose-colored trusses of 
rhododendron bloom, that golden rain on the 
laburnums, and the masses of perfumed lilac 
— all was beautiful. Not so beautiful the 
long, bare school-room, and the willow pat- 
tern cups and saucers. Not so beautiful that 
all-pervading atmosphere of restraint which 
made school odious to Fay from the very be- 
ginning. 

She stayed there for years — an eternity it 
seemed to her — looking back upon its hope- 
less monotony. Pleasure, variety, excite- 
ment she had none. Life was an everlasting 
treadmill — up and down, down and up, over 
and over again. The same dull round of les- 
sons; a dismal uniformity of food; Sunday 
penance in the shape of two long services in 
a badly ventilated church, and one long cate- 
chism in a dreary school-room. No jail can 
be much duller than a well-regulated middle- 
class girls’ school. Fay could complain of 
no ill-treatment. She was well fed, comfort- 
ably housed, neatly clad ; but her life was a 
burden to her. 

She had a bad temper; was irritable, im- 
patient, quick to take offence, and prone to 
fits of sullenness. This was the opinion of 
the authorities; and her faults increased as 
she grew older. She was not absolutely re- 
bellious towards the governesses, but there 
was always something amiss. She was idle 
and listless at her studies, took no interest in 
anything but her music -lessons, and was al- 
together an unsatisfactory pupil. She had 
no lasting friendships among her school-fel- 
lows. She was jealous and capricious in her 
likings, and was prone to fancy herself slight- 
ed or ill-treated on the very smallest provo- 
cation. The general verdict condemned her 
as the most disagreeable girl in the school. 
With the meaner souls among her school-fel- 
lows it was considered an affront that she 
should have no antecedents worth talking 
about — no relatives, no home, and no ham- 
pers or presents. She was condemned as a 
discreditable mystery; and when one un- 
lucky afternoon, a sultry afternoon at the 
beginning of a warm summer, she lost her 


16 


THE FxiTAL THREE. 


temper iu the middle of a class-lesson, burst 
into a torrent of angry speech, half defiance, 
half reproach, bounced up from her seat, and 
rushed out of the school-room, there were 
few to pity, and none to sympathize. 

The proprietress of the school was elderly 
and lymphatic. Miss Fausset had been stig- 
matized as a troublesome pupil for a long 
time. There were continual complaints about 
Miss Fausset’s conduct, worrying complaints, 
which spoiled Miss Constable’s dinner, and 
interfered with her digestion. Really, the 
only course open to that prosperous, overfed 
personage was to get rid of Miss Fausset. 
There was an amiable family of three sisters, 
highly connected young persons, whose fa- 
ther was in the wine-trade, waiting for va- 
cancies in that old-established seminary. 

“We will make a tabula rasa of a trou- 
blesome past,” said Miss Constable, who loved 
fine words. “ Miss Fausset must go.” 

Thus it was that John Fausset had been 
suddenly called upon to find a new abode for 
his ward ; and thus it was that Fay had been 
brought to Upper Parchment Street. 

No doubt Upper Parchment Street was 
better than school ; but if it had not been 
for Mildred, the atmosphere on the edge of 
Hyde Park would have been no more con- 
genial than the atmosphere at Streatham. 
Fay felt herself an intruder in that splendid 
house, where, amid that multitude of pret- 
ty things, she could not put her finger upon 
one gracious object that belonged to her — 
nothing that was her “very own,” as Mildred 
called it; for she had refused Mildred’s doll 
and all other proffered gifts, too proud to 
profit by a child’s generosity. Mrs. Fausset 
made her no gifts, never talked to her, rarely 
looked at her. 

Fay knew that Mrs. Fausset disliked her. 
She had divined as much from the first, and 
she knew only too well that dislike had grown 
with experience. She was allowed to go 
down to afternoon tea with Mildred, but had 
she been deaf and dumb her society could 
not have been less cultivated by the mistress 
of the house. Mrs. Fausset’s feelings were 
patent to the whole household, and were 
common talk in the servants’ hall. “No 
wonder,” said the women; the men said, 
“What a shame!” but footmen and house- 
maids were at one in their treatment of Fay, 
which was neglectful, and occasionally inso- 


lent. It would hardly have been possible for 
them to behave well to the intruder and keep 
in favor with Bell, who was absolute, a supe- 
rior power to butler or house-keeper, a per- 
son with no stated office, and the supremo 
right to interfere Avith everybody. 

Bell sighed, and shook her head whenever 
Miss Fay was mentioned. She bridled and 
wriggled with pent-up indignation, as if the 
girl’s existence were an injury to her, Mar- 
tha Bell. “If I hadn’t nursed Mrs. Fausset 
when she was the loveliest infant that ever 
drew breath, I shouldn’t feel it so much,” 
said Bell ; and then tears would spring to 
her eyes and chokings would convulse her 
throat, and the house-keeper would sympa- 
thize mysteriously with a mysterious trouble. 

At the end of J uly the establishment mi- 
grated from Parchment Street to Tli^ Hook, 
Mr. Fausset’s river-side villa between Chert- 
sey and Windsor. The Hook was an ex- 
panse of meadow-land bordered with wil- 
lows, round which the river made a kind of 
loop, and was not quite an island, but it was 
more than a peninsula; and on this enchant- 
ed bit of ground, spot loved by the river god, 
Mr. Fausset had built for himself the most 
delightful embodiment of that much-abused 
word villa — a long, low white house, with 
spacious rooms, broad corridors, a graciously 
curving staircase, with a double flight of 
stairs, meeting on a landing lighted by an 
Italian cupola — a villa surrounded with ve- 
randas, and looking out upon peerless gar- 
dens sloping to the willow-shaded stream. 

To Fay The Hook seemed like a vision of 
Paradise. It was almost happiness even to 
her impatient spirit to sit in a corner of those 
lovely grounds, screened from the outer 
world by a dense wall of Portugal laurels 
and arbutus, and with the blue water and 
the low, fiat meadows of the farther shore for 
her only prospect. 

Miss Colville was left behind in London. 
For Fay and Mildred life was a perpetual 
holiday. Mrs. Fausset was almost as much 
in society at The Hook as she had been in 
London. Visitors came and visitors went. 
She Avas never alone. There were parties at 
Henley and Marlow and Wargrave and Go- 
ring. Two pairs of horses were kept hard at 
work carrying Mr. and Mrs. Fausset about 
that lovely river-side landscape to garden- 
parties and dinners, picnics and regattas. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


17 


John Fausset went because his wife liked 
him to go, and because he liked to see her 
happy and admired. The two girls were 
left for the most part to their own devices, 
under the supervision of Bell. They lived 
in the gardens, with an occasional excursion 
into the unknown world along the river. 
There was a trustworthy under - gardener, 
w'ho was a good oarsman, and in his charge 
Mildred was allowed to go on the water in a 
big wherry, which looked substantial enough 
I to have carried a select boarding-school. 

This life by the Thames was the nearest 
approach to absolute happiness which Fay 
had ever known ; but for her there was to 
be no such thing as unbroken bliss. In the 
I midst of the sultry August weather Mildred 
fell ill — a mild attack of scarlet-fever, which 
sounded less alarming to Mrs. Fausset’s ear, 
i because the doctor spoke of it as scarlatina. 
It was a very mild case, the local practition- 
er told Mrs. Fausset; there was no occasion 
to summon a doctor from London ; there was 
no occasion for alarm. Mildred must keep 
I her bed for a fortnight, and must be isolated 
I from the rest of the house. Her own maid 
I might nurse her if she had had the complaint. 

1 “ How could she have caught the fever?” 
Mrs. Fausset asked, with an injured air; and 
there was a grand investigation, but no scar- 
Het-fever to be heard of nearer than Maiden- 
^head. 

“People are so artful in hiding these 
things,” said Mrs. Fausset; and ten minutes 
afterwards she begged the doctor not to 
mention Mildred’s malady to any one. 

“We have such a host of engagements, 
and crowds of visitors coming from Lon- 
don,” she said. “People are so ridiculously 
nervous. Of course I shall be extremely 
careful.” 

The doctor gave elaborate instructions 
about isolation. Such measures being taken, 
Mrs. Fausset might receive all fashionable 
London with safety. 

“And it is really such a mild case that 
you need not put yourself about in any 
g way,” concluded the doctor. 

“ Dear, sweet pet, we must do all we can 
to amuse her,” sighed the fond mother. 

4 Mild as the case might be, the patient had 
® to suffer thirst and headache, a dry and 
swollen throat, and restless nights. Her 
“ most eager desire was for Fay’s company; 
2 


and as it was ascertained that Fay had suf- 
fered from scarlet-fever some years before in 
a somewhat severe form, it was considered 
she might safely assist in the sick-room. 

She was there almost all day, and very of- 
ten in the night. She read to Mildred, and 
sang to her, and played with her, and in- 
dulged every changing fancy and caprice of 
sickness. Her love was inexhaustible, inde- 
fatigable, forever on the watch. If Mildred 
woke from a feverish dream in the deep of 
night, with a little agitated sob or cry, she 
found a figure in a white dressing-gown 
bending over her, and loving arms encircling 
her before she had time to feel frightened. 
Fay slept in a little dressing-room opening 
out of Mildred’s large, airy bedroom, so as 
to be near her darling. It was a mere closet, 
with a truckle-bed brought down from the 
servants’ attic; but it was good enough for 
Fay, whose only thought was of the child 
who loved her as none other had ever loved 
within her memory. 

Mrs. Fausset was prettily anxious about 
her child. She would come to Mildred’s 
room in her dressing-gown before her leisure- 
ly morning toilet, to hear the last report. 
She would sit by the bed for five minutes 
showering kisses on the pale cheeks, and 
then she would go away to her long summer 
day of frivolous pleasures and society talk. 
Ripples of laughter and snatches of speech 
came floating in at the open windows; and 
at Mildred’s behest Fay would stand at a 
window and report the proceedings of this 
happy world outside. 

“They are going out in the boat. They 
are going to have tea on the lawn. Your 
mamma is walking up and down with Sir 
Horace Clavering. The Misses Grenville 
are playing croquet;” and so on, and so on, 
all day. 

Mildred tossed about on her pretty white 
bed impatiently. 

“It is very horrid being shut up here on 
these flne days,” she said; “or it would be 
horrid without you. Fay. Mamma does not 
come to see me much.” 

Mamma came three or four times a day; 
but her visits were of the briefest. She 
would come into the room beaming with 
smiles, looking like living sunlight in her 
exquisite -white gown, with its delicate rib- 
bons and cloudy lace — a fleecy white cloud 


18 


THE FATAL THREE. 


just touched with rose-color, as if she were 
an embodiment of the summer dawn. Some- 
times she brought Mildred a peach, or a 
bunch of hot-house grapes, or an orchid, or 
a brand-new picture-book; but beautiful as 
these offerings were, the child did not always 
value them. She would push the plate of 
grapes or the peach aside impatiently when 
her mother was gone; or she would entreat 
Fay to eat the dainty. 

“Mamma thinks I am greedy,” she said; 
“but I ain’t, am I, Fay?” 

Those three weeks in the sick-room — those 
wakeful nights and long, slow summer days 
— strengthened the bond of love between the 
two girls. By the time Mildred was conva- 
lescent they seemed to have loved each other 
for years. Mildred could hardly remember 
what her life was like before she had Fay 
for a companion. Mrs. Fausset saw this 
growing affection not without jealousy; but 
it was very convenient that there should be 
some one in the house whose companionship 
kept Mildred happy, and she even went so 
far as to admit that Fay was “useful.” 

“I cannot be with the dear child half so 
much as I should like to be,” she said. 
“Visitors are so exacting.” 

Fay had slept very little during Mildred’s 
illness, and now that the child was nearly 
well, the elder girl began to flag somewhat, 
and was tired early in the eveoing, and glad 
to go to bed at the same hour as the patient, 
who, under Bell’s supervision, was made to 
retire before eight. She was now well enough 
to sit up all day, and to drive out in a pony- 
carriage in the sunny hours after early din- 
ner. Fay went with her, of course. Pony 
and landscape would have been wanting in 
charm without Fay’s company. Both girls 
had gone to bed one sultry evening in the 
faint gray twilight. Fay was sleeping pro- 
foundly; but Mildred, after dozing a little, 
was lying half awake, with closed eyelids, 
in the flower-scented room. The day had 
been exceptionally warm. The windows 
were all open, and a door between Mildred’s 
bedroom and sitting-room had been left ajar. 

Bell was in the sitting-room at her favorite 
task of clearing up the scattered toys and 
books^ and reducing all things to mathemat- 
ical precision. Meta, Mildred’s German maid, 
was sitting at needle-work near the window 
by the light of a shaded lamp. The light 


shone in the twilight through the partly open 
door, and gave Mildred a sense of company. 
They began to talk presently, and Mildred 
listened, idly at first, and soothed by the 
sound of their voices, but afterwards with 
keenest curiosity. 

“I know I shouldn’t like to be treated so,” 
said Meta. 

“ I don’t see that she has anything to com- 
plain of,” answered Bell. “ She has a good 
home, and everything provided for her. 
What more can she want?” 

“ I should want a good deal more if I were 
a heiress. ” 

“J.?^ heiress,” corrected Bell, who prided 
herself on having cultivated her mind, and 
was somewhat pedantic of speech. “That’s 
all nonsense, Meta. She’s no more an heiress 
than I am. Mr. Fausset told my poor young 
mistress that just to throw dust in her eyes. 
Heiress, indeed! An heiress without a rela- 
tive in the world that she can speak of — an 
heiress that has dropped from the moon. 
Don’t tell me” 

Nobody was telling Mrs. Bell anything, 
but she had a resentful air, as if combating 
the arguments of an invisible adversary. 

There was a silence during which Mildred 
nearly fell asleep, and then the voices began 
again. 

“It’s impossible for sisters to be fonder 
I of each other than those two are,” said Meta. 

I “ There’s nothing strange in that, consid- 
' ering they are sisters,” answered Bell, an- 
grily. 

‘ ‘ Oh, but you’ve no right to say that, Mrs. 
Bell. It’s going too far.” 

‘ ‘ Haven’t I a right to use my eyes and ears? 
Can’t I see the family look in those two faces, 
though Miss Mildred is pretty and Miss Fay 
is plain? Can’t I hear the same tones in the 
I two voices, and haven’t I seen Im way of 
j bringing that girl into the house, and his 
I guilty look before my poor injured mistress? 
j Of course they’re sisters. Who could ever 
j doubt it? She doesn’t, I know, poor dear.” 

She, in this connection, meant Mrs. Faus- 
set. 

There was only one point in this speeeh 
which the innocent child seized upon. She 
and Fay were said to be sisters. Oh, how 
she had longed for a sister in the last year or 
so of her life, since she had found out the 
meaning of solitude among fairest surround- 


THE FATAL THREE. 


19 


ings! How all the brightest things she pos- 
sessed had palled upon her for want of sis- 
terly companionship ! How she had longed 
for a baby-sister even, and had envied the 
children in households where a new baby 
was an annual institution! She had won- 
dered why her mother did not treat herself 
to a new baby occasionally, as so many of 
her mother’s friends did. And now Fay 
had been given to her, ever so much better 
than a baby, which would have taken such 
a long time to grow up. Mildred had never 
calculated how long; but she concluded that 
it would be some months before the most 
forward baby would be of a companionable 
age. Fay had been given to her, a read}^- 
made companion, versed in fairy tales, able 
to conjure up an enchanted world out of the 
school-room piano, skilful with pencil and 
color-box, able to draw the faces and figures 
and palaces and woodlands of that fairy 
world, able to amuse and entertain her in a 
hundred ways. And Fay was her sister after 
all. She dropped asleep in a flutter of pleas- 
urable excitement. She would ask her moth- 
er all about it to-morrow; and in the mean 
time she would say nothing to Fay. It was 
fun to have”a secret from Fay. 

A batch of visitors left next day after 
lunch. Mr. and Mrs. Fausset were to be 
alone for forty - eight hours — a wonderful 
oasis of domesticity in the society desert. 
Mildred had been promised that the first 
day there was no company she was to have 
tea with mamma in the tent on the lawn. 
She claimed the fulfilment of that promise 
to-day. 

It was a lovely day after the sultry, thun- 
dery night. Mrs. Fausset reclined in her 
basket-chair in the shelter of the tent. Fay 
and Mildred sat side by side on a low bam- 
boo bench on the grass— the little girl fairy- 
like in her white muslin and flowing flaxen 
hair, the big girl in olive - colored alpaca, 
with dark hair clustering in short curls about 
the small intelligent head. There could 
hardly have been a stronger contrast than 

i that between the two girls; and yet Bell was 
right, there was a family look, an indefin- 
able resemblance of contour and expression 
which would have struck a very attentive 
observer — something in the line of the deli- 
cate eyebrow, something in the angle of the 
forehead. 


“Mamma,” said Mildred, suddenly, clam- 
bering into her mother’s lap, “ why mayn’t 
I call Fay sister?” 

Mrs. Fausset started, and flushed crimson. 

‘ ‘ What nonsense, child I Why, because it 
would be most ridiculous.” 

“But she is my sister,” urged Mildred, 
looking full into her mother’s eyes, with tre- 
I mendous resolution in her own. “ I love her 
like a sister, and she is my sister — Bell says 
so.” 

“Bell is an impertinent person,” cried Mrs. 
Fausset, angrily. “ When did she say so?” 

“Last night, when she thought I was 
asleep. Mayn’t I call Fay sister?” persisted 
Mildred, coaxingly. 

“ On no account. I never heard anything 
so shameful! To think that Bell should gos- 
sip! An old servant like Bell — my own old 
nurse. It is too cruel,” cried Mrs, Fausset, 
forgetting herself in her anger. 

Fay stood tall and straight in the sunshine 
outside the tent, wondering at the storm, 
j She had an instinctive apprehension that 
Mrs. Fausset’s anger was humiliating to her. 
She knew not why, but she felt a sense of 
despair darker than any other evil moment 
in her life, and yet her evil moments had 
been many. 

“ You need not be afraid that I shall ask 
Mildred to call me sister,” she said. “I love 
her dearly, but I hate everybody else in this 
house.” 

“You are a wicked, ungrateful girl!” ex- 
claimed Mrs. Fausset, “and I am very sorry 
I ever saw your face.” 

Fay drew herself up, looked at the speaker 
indignantly for a moment or so, and then 
walked quietly away towards the house. 

. She passed the footman with the tea-tray 
as she crossed the lawn, and a little farther 
on she passed John Fausset, who looked at 
her wonderingly. 

Mildred burst out crying. 

“How unkind you are, mamma,” she sob- 
bed. “ If I mayn’t call her my sister, I shall 
always love her like a sister; always, always, 
always.” 

“What is the matter with my Mildred?” 
asked Mr. Fausset, arriving at this moment. 

“Nothing. She has only been silly,” his 
wife answered, pettishly. 

“And Fay— has she been silly too?” 

“ Fay, yom protegee, has been most imper- 


20 


THE FATAL THREE. 


tinent to me ; but I suppose that does not j 
count,” i 

“ It does count for a good deal, if she has | 
been intentionally impertinent,” answered , 
Fausset, gravely. | 

He looked back after Fay’s vanishing fig- 
ure with a troubled expression. He had so 
sighed for peace. He had hoped that the 
motherless girl might be taken into his home 
and cared for, and made happy, without evil 
feeling upon any one’s part; and now he 
could see by his wife’s countenance that evil 
feeling had arisen with intensity; that the 
hope of lasting peace was at an end. 

“I don’t know what you mean about inten- 
tion,” said his wife. “ I only know that the 
girl 5'^ou are so fond of has just said she hates 
everybody in this house except Mildred. 
That sounds rather like intentional imperti- 
nence, I think.” 

“Go and play, darling,” said Fausset to 
his child; “or run after Fay and bring her 
back to tea.” 

“You show a vast amount of consideration 
for your wife,” said Mrs. Fausset. 

“ My dear Maud, I want you to show a lit- 
tle more consideration for that girl, who has 
been so devoted to Mildred all through her 
illness, and who has one very strong claim 
upon a mother’s heart— she is motherless.” 

“I should think more of that claim, per- 
haps, if I knew who her mother was, and 
what she was to you,” said Maud Fausset. 

‘ ‘ She was once near and dear to me. That 
is all I can tell you, Maud, and it ought to 
be enough.” 

“It is more than enough,” his wife an- 
swered, trembling from head to foot as she 
rose from her low chair and walked away 
from the tent. 

John Fausset looked after her irresolutely, 
went a few steps as if he meant to follow her, j 
and then turned back to the tent just as Mil- j 
dred reappeared with Fay from another di- 1 
reetion. 

“We three will have tea together,” said Mr. 
Fausset with elaborate cheerfulness. ‘ ‘ Mam- 
ma is not very well, Mildred ; she has gone 
baek to the house. You shall pour out mv 
tea.” 

He seated himself in his wife’s chair, and 
Mildred sat on his knee, and put her arms 
around his neck, and adored him with all 
her power of adoration. Her household di- 


vinity had ever been her father. Perhaps her 
baby mind had found out the weakness of 
one parent and the strength of the other. 

“Fay shall pour out the tea,” she said, 
with a sense of making a vast sacrifice; “it 
will be a treat for Fay.” 

So Fay poured out the tea, and they all 
sat in the tent, and were happy and merry— 
or seemingly so, perhaps, as concerned John 
Fausset — for one whole sunshiny hour, and 
for the first time Fay felt that she was not 
an outsider. Yet there lurked in her mind 
the memory of Mrs. Fausset’s anger, and that 
memory was bitter^ 

“What am I, that almost everybody should 
be rude to me?” she asked herself, as she sat 
alone that night, after Mildred had gone to 
bed. 

From the open windows below came the 
languid sweetness of a nocturne by Chopin. 
Mrs. Fausset was playing her husband to 
sleep after dinner. Sure token of reconcili- 
ation between husband and wdfe. 

The doctor came next morning. He ap- 
peared upon alternate days now, and looked 
at Mildred in a casual manner, after exhaust- 
ing the local gossip with Mrs. Fausset. This 
morning he and Mrs. Fausset were particu- 
larly confidential before the patient was sent 
for. 

“Admirable !” he exclaimed, when he had 
looked at her tongue and felt her pulse ; ‘ ‘ we 
are as nearly well as we can be. All we want 
now” is a little sea-air to set us up for the win- 
ter. The great point, my dear madam ” — to 
Mrs. Fausset — “is to avoid all risk of seqiielce. 
A fortnight at Brighton or Eastbourne will 
restore our little friend to perfect health.” 

There were no difficulties in the way of 
such people as the Faussets — no question of 
ways and means. Bell was sent for, and 
despatched to Eastbourne by an afternoon 
train. She was to take lodgings in a perfect 
position, and of impeccable repute as to sani- 
tation. Mildred was to follow next day un- 
der convoy of Meta and the under-butler, a 
responsible person of thirty-five. 

“Fay will go too!” exclaimed Mildred — 
whereupon followed a tragic scene. 

Fay was not to go to Eastbourne. No rea- 
sons were assigned for the decision. Mildred 
was to ride a donkey ; she w'as to have a pony- 
carriage at her disposition ; but she w^as to be 


THE FATAL THREE. 


21 


without Fay for a whole fortnight. In a 
fortnight she would he able to come home 
again. 

“ How many days are there in a fortnight?” 
she asked, piteously. 

“ Fourteen.” 

“Oh, Fay, fourteen days away from you!” 
she exclaimed, clinging witli fond arms round 
Fay’s neck, and pulling down the dark head 
on a level with her own bright hair. 

Fay was pale but tearless, and said not a 
word. She let Mildred kiss her, and kissed 
back again, but in a dead silence. She went 
into the hall with the child, and to the car- 
riage door, and they kissed each other on the 
door-step, and they kissed at the carriage- 
window, and then the horses trotted away 
along the gravel drive, and Fay had a last 
glimpse of the fair head thrust out of the 
window, and the lilies and roses of a child’s 
face framed in pale-gold hair. 

It was a little more than a fortnight before 
Bell and her charge went back to The Hook. 
Mildred had sorely missed her playfellow, 
but had consoled herself with a spade and 
pail on the beach, and a donkey of venerable 
aspect, whose chief distinction was his white 
linen panoply on the flat and dusty roads. 

Mrs. Fausset was not at home to receive her 
daughter. She had a superior duty at Chert- 
sey, where people of some social importance 
were giving a lawn-party. The house seemed 
empty and silent, and all its brightness and 
graceful furniture and flowers in the hall and 


on the staircase could not atone for the ab- 
sence of human life. 

“Where is Fay?”’ cried Mildred, taking 
alarm. 

Nobody answered a question which was 
addressed to everybody. 

“Fay ! Fay ! where are you?” cried the 
child, and then rushed up-stairs to the school- 
room, light as a lapwing, distracted with that 
sudden fear. “Fay! Fay!” The treble cry 
rang through the house. 

No one in the school-room, nor in Mildred’s 
bedroom, nor in the little room where Fay 
had slept, nor in the drawing-rooms, whither 
Mildred came running after that futile quest 
up-stairs. 

Bell met her in the hall with a letter in her 
hand. 

“Your mamma wished to break it to you 
herself, miss,” said Bell. “Miss Fay has 
gone.” 

“Gone! where?” 

“To Brussels.” 

“Where is Brussels?” 

‘ ‘ I believe, miss, that it is the capital of 
Belgium.” 

Mildred tore open the letter, which Bell 
read aloud over the child’s shoulder: 

‘ ‘ I hope you won’t be grieved at losing your 
playfellow, my dearest pet. Fay is dreadful- 
ly backward in her education, and has no 
manners. She has gone to a finishing-school 
at Brussels, and you may not see her again 
for some years.” 


CHAPTER V. 

WITHOUT THE WOLF. 


“ Father,” said Lola, “ there are ever so 
many people in the village ill with fever. 
Isn’t it sad?” 

Mr. and Mrs. Greswold, of Enderby Man- 
or, had been submitting to a fortnight’s dis- 
sipation in London, and this was their first 
Sunday at home after that interval. They 
had returned late on the previous night, and 
house and gardens had all the sweetness and 
freshness of a scene to which one is restored 
after absence. They had spent the summer 
morning in the little village church with their 


daughter, and now they were enjoying the lei- 
sure interval between church and luncheon. 

George Greswold sat in a lounging-chair 
under a cedar within twenty yards of the 
dining-room windows, and Lola was hanging 
about him as he read the Atlienmim, caress- 
ing him with little touches of light hands 
upon his hair or his coat-collar, adoring him 
with all her might after the agony of sever- 
ance. 

She was his only child, and the love be- 
tween them was passing the love of the fa- 


THE FATAL THREE. 


ther and daughter of every-day life. It was 
an almost romantic attachment. 

Like most only daughters, Lola was preco- 
cious, in advance of her years in thoughtful- 
ness and emotion, though perhaps a little 
behind the average girl of twelve in the se- 
verities of feminine education. She had been 
her mother’s chief companion from babyhood, 
the confidante of all that mother’s thoughts 
and fancies, which w^ere as innocent as those 
of childhood itself. She had read much more 
than most girls of her age, and had been made 
familiar with poets whose names are only 
known to the school-girl in a history of liter- 
ature. She knew a good deal about the best 
books in European literature; but most of all 
she knew the hearts and minds of her father 
and mother, their loves and likings, their joys 
and sorrows. She had never been shut out 
from their confidence; she had never been 
told to go and play when they wanted to talk 
to each other. She had sat with them, and 
walked and ridden and driven with them ever 
since she was old enough to dispense with her 
nurse’s arms. She had lived her young life 
with them, and had been a part of their lives. 

George Greswold looked up from his Atlie- 
nmum in quick alarm. 

“Fever !” he exclaimed — “fever at En- 
derby!” 

■ “Strange, isn’t it, father? Everybody is 
wondering about it — Enderby has always 
been such a healthy village, and you have 
taken such pains to make it so.” 

“Yes, love, I have done my best. I am a 
landlord for pleasure and not for gain, as you 
and mother know.” 

“ And what seems strangest, and worst of 
all,” continued Lola, “is that this dreadful 
fever has broken out among the people you 
and mother and I are fondest of— our old 
friends and pensioners — and the children we j 
know most about. It seems so hard that I 
those you and mother have helped the most 
should be the first to be ill in all the village.” 

“Yes, love, that seems very hard for my 
tender-hearted darling.” 

Her father looked up at her fondly as she 
stood behind his chair, her white arm lean- 
ing upon his shoulder. The summer was in 
its zenith ; it was strawberry-time, rose-time, 
haymaking-time — the season of nightingales 
and meadowsweet and tall Mary lilies, and 
all those lovely things that cluster in the very 


core of summer’s great warm heart. Lola 
was all in white, a loose muslin frock, straight 
from shoulder to instep. Her thick gold hair 
fell straight as her frock below her ungirdled 
waist, and in her white and gold she had the 
look of an angel in an early Italian picture. 
Her eyes were as blue as that cloudless sky 
of midsummer w'hich took a deeper azure be- 
hind the black-green branches of the cedar. 

“My pet, I take it this fever is some slight 
summer malady. Cottagers are such ravens 
— they always make the worst of an illness.” 

“ Oh, but they really have been very bad. 
Mary Martin has had the fever, but she is 
getting better. And there’s Johnny Giles — 
you know what a strong boy he is — he’s very 
bad, poor little chap — so delirious; and I do 
feel so sorry for his poor mother. And young 
Mrs. Peter has it, and two of her children. ” 

“It must be contagious,” said Greswold, 
seizing his daughter’s round white arm with 
an agitated movement. “ You have not been 
to see any of them, have you, Lola?” he ask- 
ed, looking at her with unspeakable anxi- 
ety. 

“ No, Mrs. Bell wouldn’t let me go to see 
any of them ; but of course I have taken them 
things every day — wine, and beef -tea, and 
jelly, and everything we could think of, and 
they have had as much milk as they liked. ” 

“You should not have gone yourself with 
the things, darling. You should have sent 
them.” 

“ That would seem so unkind — as if one 
hardly cared ; and Puck with nothing to do 
all the time but to draw me about. It was 
no trouble to go myself. I did not even go 
inside the cottages. Bell said I mustn’t.” 

“ Bell was right. Well, I suppose there is 
no harm done if you didn’t go into any of the 
cottages ; and it was very sweet of you to take 
the things yourself, like Red Riding -hood, 
only without the woL ! There goes the gong. 
I hope you are hungry. ” 

“ Not very. The weather is too warm for 
eating anything but strawberries.” 

He looked at her anxiously again, ready to 
take alarm at a word. 

“Yes, it is too warm in this south-western 
country,” he said, nervously. “ We’ll go to 
Scotland next week.” 

“ So soon?” 

“ Wh}'^ not a little sooner than usual, for 
i once in a way?” 


THE FATAL THREE. 23 


I “I shall he sorry to go away while the 
j people are ill,” she said, gravely. 

I George Greswold forgot that the gong had 
sounded. He sat, leaning forward, in a de- 
i spondent attitude. The very mention of sick- 
ness in the land had unhinged him. This 
child was so dear to him — his one ewe lamb. 
He had done all that forethought, sense, and 
science could do to make the village which 
lay at his doors the very shrine of health and 
purity. Famous sanitarians had been enter- 
tained at the manor, and had held counsel 
witfi Mr. Greswold upon the progress of san- 
itation and its latest developments. They 
had wondered with him over the blindness 
and ignorance of our forefathers. They had 
instructed him how to drain his house, and 
how to ventilate and purify his cottages. 
They had assured him that, so far as human- 
ity can ever hope to attain, perfection had 
been achieved in Enderby village and Ender- 
by Manor-house. 

And now his idolized daughter hung over 
his chair and told him that there was fever 
raging in the land — his land— the land which 
he loved as if it were a living thing, and on 
which he had lavished care and money ever 
since he had owned it. Other men might 
consider their ancestral estates as something 
to be lived upon ; George Greswold thought 
of his forefathers’ house and lands as some- 
thing to be lived for. His cottages were 
model cottages, and he was known far and 
wide as a model landlord. 

“George, are you quite forgetting lunch- 
eon?” asked a voice from one of the open 
windows, and he looked up to see a beauti- 
ful face looking out at him, framed in hair 
of Lola’s color. 

“ My dear Mildred, come here for a mo- 
ment,” he said, and his wife went to him, 
smiling still, but with a shade of uneasiness 
in her face. 

“Go in, pet. We’ll follow you directly,” 
he said to his daughter, and then he rose 
slowly, with an air of being almost broken 
down by a great trouble, and put his arm 
through his wife’s arm and led her along the 
velvet turf beyond the cedar. 

“ Mildred, have you heard of this fe- 
ver?” 

“Yes; Louisa told me this morning when 
she was doing my hair. It seems to be rath- 
er bad ; but there cannot be any danger sure- 


ly after all you have done to make the cot- 
tages perfect in every way?” 

“ One cannot tell. There may be a germ 
of evil brought from somewhere else. I am 
sorry Lola has been among the people. ” 

“Oh, but she has not been inside any of 
the cottages; Bell took care to prevent that.” 

“ Bell was wise, but she might have done 
better still. She should have telegraphed to 
us. Lola must not go about any more. You 
will see to that, won’t you, dearest? Before 
the end of the week I will take you both to 
Scotland.” 

“Do you really suppose there can be dan- 
ger?” she asked, growing very pale. 

“ No, no; I don’t apprehend danger. Only 
it is better to be over-cautious than over-bold. 
We cannot be too careful of our treasure.” 

“No, no, indeed,” answered the mother, 
with a piteous look. 

“Mother,” called Lola from the window, 
“ are you ever coming? Pomfret will be late 
for church.” 

Pomfret was the butler, whose convenience 
had to be studied a little upon Sundays. The 
servants dined while the family were at lunch- 
eon, and almost all the establishment went to 
afternoon service, leaving a footman and an 
under-housemaid in sole possession of the 
great, grave old manor-house, where the si- 
lence had a solemnity as in some monastic 
chapel. Lola was anxious that luncheon 
should begin, and Pomfret be dismissed to 
eat his dinner. 

This child of twelve had more than a wom- 
an’s forethought. She spent her life in think- 
ing about other people; but of all those whom 
she loved, and for whom she cared, her father 
was first and chief. For him her love was 
akin to worship. 

She watched his face anxiously now, as she 
took her seat at his right hand, and was si- 
lent until Pomfret had served the soup and 
retired, leaving all the rest of the luncheon 
on the table, and the wine on a dumb-waiter 
by his master’s side. 

There was always a cold luncheon on Sun- 
days, and the evening meal was also cold, 
a compromise between dinner and supper, 
served at nine o’clock, by which time the 
servants had gratified their various tastes for 
church or chapel, and had enjoyed an even- 
ing walk. There was no parsonage in Eng- 
land where the day of rest was held in more 


24 


THE FATAL THREE. 


reverence than it was at Enderby Manor- 
house. 

Mr. Greswold was no bigot, his religion in 
nowise savored of the over-good school ; but 
he was a man of deep religious convictions, 
and he had been brought up to honor Sunday 
as a day set apart. 

The Sunday parties and Sunday amuse- 
ments of fashionable London were an abomi- 
nation to him, though he was far too liberal 
minded to wish to shut museums and picture- 
galleries against the people. 

“Father,” said Lola, when they were alone, 
“I’m afraid you had your bad dream last 
night. ” 

Greswold looked at her curiously. 

“No, love, my dreams were colorless, and 
have left not even a remembrance.” 

“And yet you look sorrowful, just as you 
always look after your bad dream.” 

“Your father is anxious about the cottagers 
who are ill, dearest,” said Mrs. Greswold. 
“ That is all.” 

“But you must not be unhappy about 
them, father dear. You don’t think that 
any of them will die, do you?” asked Lola, 
drawing very near him, and looking up at 
him with awe-stricken eyes. 

“ Indeed, my love, I hope not. They shall 
not die, if care can save them. I will walk 
round the village with Porter this afternoon 
and find out all about the trouble. If there 
is anything that he cannot understand, we’ll 
have Pond over from Southampton, or a 
physician from London if necessary. My 
people shall not be neglected.” 

‘ ‘ May I go with you this afternoon, father?” 

“ No, dearest; neither you nor mother must 
leave the grounds till we go away. I will 
have no needless risks run by my dear ones. ” 

Neither mother nor daughter disputed his 
will upon this point. He was the sole arbi- 
ter of their lives. It seemed almost as if 
they lived only to please him. Both would 
have liked to go with him ; both thought him 
over-cautious ; yet neither attempted to argue 
the point. Happy household in which there 
are no arguments upon domestic trifles, no 
bickerings about the infinitesimals of life. 

Enderby Manor was one of those ideal 
homes which adorn the face of England, and 
sustain its reputation as the native soil of 
domestic virtues, the country in which good 
wives and good mothers are indigenous. 


There are many such ideal homes in the 
land, as to outward aspect, seen from the 
high-road, across park or pasture, shrubbery 
or flower-garden; but only a few of these, 
upon intimate knowledge, sustain the idea of 
the interior. 

Here, within as well as without, the atmos- 
phere was peace. Those velvet lawns and 
brilliant flower-beds were not more perfect 
than the love between husband and wife, 
child and parents. No cloud had ever shad- 
owed that serene heaven of domestic peace. 
George Greswold had married at thirty a girl 
of eighteen who adored him; and those two 
had lived for each other and for their only 
child ever since. All outside the narrow 
circle of family love counted only as the 
margin or the framework of life. All the 
deepest and sweetest elements of life were 
within the veil. Mildred Greswold could 
not conceive a fashionable woman’s exist- 
ence, a life given up to frivolous occupations 
and futile excitements, a life of empty pleas- 
ure faintly flavored with art, literature, sci- 
ence, philanthropy, and politics, and fancy- 
ing itself eminently useful and eminently 
progressive. She had seen such a career in 
her childhood, and had wondered that any 
reasoning creature could so live. She had 
turned her back upon the modish world 
when she married George Greswold, and had 
surrendered most of the delights of society 
to lead quiet days in her husband’s ancestral 
home, loving that old house for his sake as 
he loved it for the sake of the dead. 

They were not in outer darkness, however, 
as to the movement of the world. They 
spent a week or a fortnight at Limmers oc- 
casionally, when the fancy moved them. 
They saw all the pictures worth seeing, 
heard a good deal of the best music, mixed 
just enough in society to distinguish gold 
from tinsel, and to make a happy choice of 
friends. 

They occasionally treated themselves to a 
week in Paris, and their autumn holidays 
were generally spent in a shooting-box twen- 
ty miles beyond Inverness. They came back 
to the manor for Christmas, and the new 
year generally began with a house -party 
which lasted, with variations, until the hunt- 
ing was all over and the leaves were thick 
in the neighboring forest. No lives could 
have been happier, or fuller of interest; but 


THE FATAL THREE. 25 


the interest all centred in home. Farmers 
and cottagers on the estate were cared for as 
a part of home, and the estate itself was 
loved almost as a living thing by husband 
and wife and the fair child who had been 
born to them in the old-fashioned house. 

The grave red-brick manor-house had been 
built when William III. was king, and there 
were some Dutch innovations in the old Eng- 
lish architecture; notably a turret, or pavil- 
ion, at the end of each wing, and a long bowl- 
ing-green on the western side of the garden. 
The walls had that deep glowing red which 
is seen only in old brickwork, and the black 
glazed tiles upon the hopper roof glittered in 
the sunlight with the prismatic hues of an- 
tique Rhodian glass. The chief character- 
istic of the interior was the oak panelling, 
which clothed the rooms and corridors as in 
a garment of sober brown, and would have 
been suggestive of gloom but for the pict- 
ures and porcelain which brightened all the 
rooms, and the rich coloring of brocaded 
curtains and tapestry portieres. The chief 
charm of the house was the aspect of home- 
life, the books and musical instruments, the 
art treasures and flowers and domestic trifles 
to be seen everywhere; the air which every 
room and every nook and corner had of be- 
ing lived in by home-loving and home-keep- 
ing people. 

The pavilion at the end of the south-west 
wing was Lola’s special domain ; that and the 
room communicating with it. That pretty 
sitting-room, with dwarf book-shelves, water- 
color pictures, and Wedgwood china, was 
never called a school-room. It was Lola’s 
study. 

‘ ‘ There shall be no suggestion of school in 
our home,” said George Greswold. 

It was he who chose his daughter’s mas- 
ters, and it was often he who attended dur- 
ing the lesson, listening intently to the prog- 
ress of the work, and as keenly interested in 
the pupil’s progress as the pupil herself. 
Latin he himself taught her, and she already 
knew by heart those noblest of Horace’s odes 
which are Attest for young lips. Their phi- 
losophy saddened her a little. 

“ Is life always changing?” she asked her 
father. “Must one never venture to be quite 
happy?” 

The Latin poet’s pervading idea of muta- 
bility, inevitable death, and inevitable change 


impressed her with a flavor of sadness, child 
as she was. 

‘ ‘ My dearest, had Horace been a Christian, 
as you are, and had he lived for others, as 
you do, he would not have been afraid to call 
himself happy,” answered George Greswold. 
“He was a pagan, and he put on the armor 
of philosophy for want of the armor of 
faith.” 

These lessons in the classics, taking a dead 
language not as a dry study of grammar and 
dictionary, but as the gate to new worlds of 
poetry and philosophy, had been Lola’s de- 
light. She was in nowise unpleasantly pre- 
cocious; but she was far in advance of the 
conventional school-room child, trained into 
characterless uniformity by a superior gov- 
erness. Lola had never been under governess 
rule. Her life at the manor had been as free 
as that of the butterflies. There was only 
Bell to lecture her — white-haired Mrs. Bell, 
thin and spare, straight as an arrow, at sev- 
enty-four years of age, the embodiment of 
servants’ hall gentility in her black silk after- 
noon gown, and neat cambric cap ; Bell, who 
looked after Lola’s health and Lola’s rooms, 
and was forever tidying drawers and tables, 
and lecturing upon the degeneracy of girl- 
hood. It was her boast to have nursed Lola’s 
grandmother, as well as Lola’s mother, which 
seemed going back to the remoteness of the 
dark ages. 

Enderby Manor was three miles from Rom- 
sey, and within riding or driving distance of 
the New Forest and of Salisbury Cathedral. 
It lay in the heart of a pastoral district wa- 
tered by the Test, and was altogether one of 
the most enjoyable estates in that part of the 
country. 

Before luncheon was finished a messenger 
was on his way to the village to summon Mr. 
Porter, more commonly Dr. Porter, the par- 
ish and everybody’s doctor, an elderly man 
of burly figure, cross-cropped gray hair, and 
yeoman -like bearing — a man born on the 
soil, whose father and grandfather and great- 
grandfather had cured or killed the inhabi- 
tants of Enderby parish from time immemo- 
rial. Judging from the tombstones in the 
pretty old church-yard, they must have cured 
more than the}’’ killed, for those crumbling 
moss-grown stones bore the record of patri- 
archal lives, and the Union near Enderby 
was a museum of incipient centenarians. 

i 

/ 


26 


THE FATAL THREE. 


Mr. Porter came into the grave old library 
at the manor looking more serious than his 
wont, perhaps in sympathy with George Gres- 
wold’s anxious face, turned towards the door 
as the footman opened it. 

“ Well, Porter, what does it all mean, this 
fever?” asked Greswold, abruptly. 

Mr. Porter had a manner of discussing a 
case which was all his own. He always ap- 
pealed to his patient with a professional air, 
as if consulting another medical authority, 
and a higher one than himself. It was flat- 
tering, perhaps, but not always satisfactory. 

“Well, you see, there’s the high tempera- 
ture — 104 in some cases — and there’s the 
throat, and there’s headache. What do you 
say?” 

“Don’t talk nonsense. Porter; you must i 
know whether it is a malignant, infectious 
fever or not. If you don’t know we’ll send 
to Southampton for Pond.” 

“ Of course you can have him if you like. 

I judge more by temperature than anything 
— the thermometer is a safer guide than the 
pulse, as you know. I took their tempera- 
tures this morning before I went to church 
— only one case in which there was improve- 
ment — all the others decidedly worse — very 
V strongly developed cases of malignant fe- 
ver-typhus or typhoid — which, as you 
know, by Jenner’s differentiation of the two 
forms—” 

“ For God’s sake, man, don’t talk to me as 
if I were a doctor, and had your ghoulish 
relish of disease. If you have the slightest 
doubt as to treatment send for Pond.” 

He took a sheaf of telegraph forms from 
the stand in fronix of him, and began to write 
his message while' he was talking. He had 
made up his mind that Dr. Pond must come 
to’see these humble sufferers, and to investi- 
gate the cause of evil. He had taken such 
pains to create a healthy settlement, had 
spared no expense; and for fifteen years, from 
the hour of his succession until now, all had I 
gone well with him. And now there was fe- 
ver in the land, fever in the air breathed by 
those two beloved ones, daughter and wife. 

“I have been so happy; my life has been 
cloudless, save for one dark memory,” he 
said to himself, covering his face with his 
hands as he leaned wdth his elbows on the 
table, while Mr. Porter expatiated upon the 
cases in the village, and on fever in general. 


“I have tested the water in all the wells 
— perfectly pure. There can be nothing 
amiss with the milk, for all my patients are 
getting it from your own dairy. The drain- 
age is perfection — yet here we have an out- 
break of fever, which looks remarkably like 
typhoid.” 

“ Why not say at once that it is typhoid?” 

“The symptoms all point that way.” 

“You say there can be nothing amiss with 
the milk. You have not analyzed it, I sup- 
pose?” 

“Why should I? Out of your own dairy, 
where everything is managed in the very 
best way — the perfection of cleanliness in 
every detail.” 

“You ought to have analyzed the milk 
i all the same,” said Greswold, thoughtfully. 
“ The strength of a chain is its weakest link. 
There may be some weak link here, though 
we cannot put our fingers upon it — yet. Are 
there many cases?” 

“Let me see. There’s Johnny Giles, and 
Mrs. Peter and her children, and Janet Daw- 
son, and there’s Andrew Rogers, and there’s 
Mary Rainbow,” began Mr. Porter, counting 
on his fingers as he went on, until the list of 
sufferers came to eleven. “Mostly young- 
sters,” he said in conclusion. 

“They ought to have been isolated,” said 
Greswold. “I will get out plans for an in- 
firmaiy to-morrow. There is the willow- 
field, on the other side of the village, a ridge 
of high ground sloping towards the parish 
drain, with a southern exposure, a capital 
site for a hospital. It is dreadful to think of 
fever-poison spreading from eleven different 
cottages. Which was the first case?” 

“Little Rainbow.” 

“ That fair-haired child whom I used to 
see from my dressing-room window every 
morning as she w’ent away from the dairy, 
tottering under a pitcher of milk. Poor lit- 
tle Polly! She was a favorite with us all. 

1 Is she very ill?” 

“ Yes, I think hers is about the best case,” 
answered the doctor, unctuously; “the oth- 
ers are a little vague— but there's no doubt 
about her, all the symptoms strongly marked 
— a very clear case.” 

“Is there any danger of a fatal termina- 
tion?” 

‘ ‘ I’m afraid there is. ” 

“Poor little Polly— poor pretty little girl! 




THE FATAL THREE. 


27 


I used to know it Tvas seven o’clock when I and arbutus. It had been originally a chapel, 
saw that bright little flaxen head flit by the and was used as a receptacle for all manner 
yew hedge yonder. Polly was as good a of out-of-door lumber when Mildred came to 
time-keeper as any clock in the village. And ! the manor. She had converted the old stone 
you think she may die? You have not told | building into a model dairy, with outside gal- 
Lola, I hope?” j lery arid staircase of solid wood-work, and 

“No, I have not let out anything about with a Swiss roof. Other buildings had been 
danger. Lola is only too anxious already.” added to this one large barn-shaped edifice. 


“I will put the infirmary in hand to-mor- 
row ; and I will take Mrs. Greswold and Lola 
to Scotland on Tuesday.” 

“Upon my word it will be a very good 
thing to get them away. These fever cases 
are so mysterious. There’s no knowing what 
shape infection may take. I have the strong- 
est belief in your system of drainage — ” 
“Nothing is perfect,” said Mr. Greswold, 
impatiently. “The science of sanitation is 
still in its infancy. I sometimes think we 
have not advanced very far from the knowl- 
edge of our ancestors, whose homes were 
desolated by the Black Death. However, 
don’t let us talk, Porter. Let us act if we 
can. Come and look at the dairy. ” 

“You don’t apprehend evil there?” 
“There are three sources of typhoid poi- 
son — drainage, water, milk. You say the 
drains and the water are good, and that the 
milk comes from my own dairy. If you are 
right, as to the first and secpnd, the third 
must be wrong, no matter whose dairy it 
may come from.” 

He took up his hat, and went out of the 
house with the doctor. Gardens and shrub- 
beries stretched before them in all their beau- 
ty of summer verdure, gardens and shrub- 
beries which had been the delight and pride 
of many generations of Greswolds, but loved 
more dearly by none than by George Gres- 
wold and Mildred, his wife. In Mildred’s 
mind the old family house was a part of her 
husband’s existence, an attribute rather than 
a mere possession. Every tree and every 
shrub was sacred. These his mother’s own 
hands had cropped and tended; those grand- 
fathers and great-grandfathers and arrUre 
great-grandfathers had planted in epochs that 
distance has made romantic. 

On the right of the hall door a broad gravel 
path led in a serpentine sweep towards the 
stables, a long, low building spread over a 
considerable area, and hidden by shrubberies. 
The dairy was a little farther off, approached 
by a winding walk through thickets of laurel 


There were low cow-houses and tall pigeon- 
houses, and a picturesque variety of gables 
and elevations which was delightful to the 
eye, seen on a summer afternoon such as this 
June Sunday, amid the odor of clove carna- 
tions ^nd old English roses, and the cooing 
of doves. 

Mrs. Greswold’s Channel Island cows were 
her delight, creatures with coats of tawny or 
gray, black noses, and wistful brown eyes. 
Scarcely a day passed on which she did not 
waste an hour or so in the cow-houses or in 
the meadows caressing these favorites. Each 
cow had her name painted in blue and white 
above her stall, and the chief, or duchess of 
the herd, was very severe in the maintenance 
of cow-house precedence, and knew how to 
resent the insolence of a new-comer who 
should presume to cross the threshold in ad- 
vance of her. 

The dairy itself had a solemn and shadowy 
air, like a shrine, and was as pretty as the 
dairy at Frogmore. The walls were lined 
with Minton tiles, the shallow milk-pans were 
of Doulton pottery, and quaintly shaped 
pitchers of bright colors were ranged on 
china brackets along the walls. The win- 
dows were latticed with panes of ruby, rose, 
or amethyst here and there, as if put in hap- 
hazard among the old bottle-green glass. 

The chief dairy-woman lived at an old- 
fashioned cottage on the premises, with her 
husband, the cow-keeper; and their garden, 
which lay at the back of cow-houses and 
dairy, was the very ideal of an old English 
garden, in which flowers and fruit strive for 
the mastery. In a corner of this garden, 
close to the outer offices of the cottage, 
among rows of peas and summer cabbages, 
and great overgrown lavender bushes and 
moss-roses, stood the old well, with its crum- 
bling brick border and ancient spindle — a 
well that had been dug when the old manor- 
house was new. 

There were other water arrangements for 
Mrs. Greswold’s dairy, a new artesian well on 


28 


THE FATAL THREE. 


a hill a quarter of a mile from the kitchen 
garden — a well that went deep down into the 
chalk, and w’as famous for the purity of its 
water. All the drinking-water of the house 
was supplied from this well, and the water 
was laid on in iron pipes to dairy and cow- 
houses. All the vessels used for milk or 
cream were washed in this water, at least 
such were Mr. Greswold’s strict orders — or- 
ders supposed to be carried out under the 
supervision of his bailiff and house-keeper. 

Mr. Porter looked at a reeking heap of 
stable manure that sprawled within twenty 
feet of the old well with suspicion in his eye, 
and from the manure heap he looked at the 
back premises of the old cob -walled cot- 
tage. 

“ I’m afraid there may have been soakage 
from that manure heap into the well,” he 
said, “and if your dairy vessels are washed 
in that water—” 

“But they never are,” answered Greswold; 
“that water is only used for the garden — 
eh, Mrs. Wadman?” 

The dairy -woman was standing on the 
threshold of her neat little kitchen, courtesy- 
ing to her master, resplendent in her Sunday 
gown of bright blue merino, and her Sunday 
brooch, containing her husband’s photograph, 
colored out of knowledge. 

“No, of course not, sir; leastways never 
except there was something wrong with the 
pipes from the artesian.” 

“Something w;rong; when was that? I 
never heard of anything wrong.” 

“Well, sir, my husband didn’t want to be 
troublesome, and Mr. Thomas he gave the 
order for the men from Romsey ; that was on 
the Saturday after working hours, and they 
was to come as it might be on the Monday 
morning, and they never come near, and Mr. 
Thomas he wrote and wrote, and my husband, 
he says it ain’t no use writing, and he takes 
the pony and rides over to Romsey in his 
overtime, and he complains about the men 
not coming, and they tells him there’s a big 
job on at Broadlands, and not a plumber to 
be had for love or money; but the pipes is all 
right now, sir.” 

“Now? Since when have they been in 
working order?” 

“ Since yesterday, sir. Mr. Thomas was 
determined he’d have everything right before 
you came back. ” 


“ And how long have you been using that 
water ” — pointing to the well, with its moss- 
grown brickwork and flaunting margin of 
yellow stonecrop — “for dairy purposes?” 

“ Well, you see, sir, we was obliged to use 
water of some kind ; and there ain’t purer or 
better water than that'for twenty mile round. 
I always use it for my kettle every time I 
make tea for me or my master, and never 
found no harm from it in the last fifteen 
years. ” 

‘ ‘ How long have you used it for the dairy ?” 
repeated Greswold, angrily; “can’t you give 
a straight answer, woman?” 

Mrs. Wadman could not — had never achiev- 
ed a direct reply to a plain question within 
the memory of man. 

“ The men was to have come on the Mon- 
day morning, first thing,” she said, “ and they 
didn’t come till the Tuesday week after that, 
and then they was that slow — ” 

George Greswold walked up and down the 
garden-path, raging. 

“She won’t answer,” he cried. “Was it 
a -week — a fortnight — three weeks ago that 
you began to use that water for your dairy?” 
he asked, sternly, and gradually he and the 
doctor extorted from her that the garden well 
had been in use for the dairy nearly three 
weeks up to yesterday. 

“ Then that is enough to account for every- 
thing,” said Dr. Porter. “First there is fil- 
tration of manure through a gravelly soil — 
inevitable — and next there is something 
worse. She had her sister here from Salis- 
bury-six weeks ago— down with typhoid 
fever three days after she came— brought it 
from Salisbury.” 

“Yes, yes— I remember,” said Greswold, 

‘ ‘ you told me there was no danger of infec- 
tion.” 

‘ ‘ There need have been none. I made her 
use all precautions possible in an old-fashion- 
ed cottage; but however careful she might 
be, there would be always the risk of a well 
— close at hand like that one— getting taint- 
ed. I asked her if she ever used that water 
for anything but the garden, and she said no, 
the artesian well supplied every want. And 
now she talks about her kettle, and tells us 
coolly that she has been using that polluted 
water for the last three weeks, and poison- 
ing a whole village.” 

“ Me poisoning the village! Oh, Dr. Por- 


THE FATAL THREE, 


29 


ter, how can you say such a cruel thing? Me 
that wouldn’t hurt a fly if I knew it.” 

“ Perhaps not, Mrs. Wadman; but I’m afraid 
you’ve hurt a good many of your neighbors 
without knowing it.” 

George Greswold stood in the path-way, 
silent and deadly pale. He had been so 
happy for the last thirteen years of his life 
— a sky without a cloud — and now in a mo- 
ment the clouds were closing round him, and 
again all might be darkness, as it had been 
once before in his life. Calamity for which 
he felt himself unaccountable had come upon 
him before — swift as an arrow from the bow 
— and now again he stood helpless, smitten 
by the hand of fate. 

He thought of the little village child, with 
her pretty, guileless face, looking up at his 
window as she tripped by with her pitcher, 
and his dole of milk had been fatal to the 
simple souls who had looked up to him as a 
providence. He had taken such pains that 
all should be sweet and wholesome in his 
people’s cottages, he had spent money like 
water, and had lectured them and taught 
them ; and lo, from his own luxurious home 
the evil had gone forth. Careless servants, 
hushing up a difficulty, loath to approach 


him with plain facts, lest they should be 
considered troublesome, had brought this 
evil, had spread disease and death in the 
land. 

And his own and only child, the delight of 
his life, the apple of his eye — that tainted 
milk had been served at her table. Amid 
all that grace of porcelain and flowers the 
poison had lurked as at the cottager’s board. 
What if she too should suffer? 

He meant to take her away in a day or 
two — now — now when the cause of evil was 
at work no longer. The thought that it 
might be too late, that the germ of poison 
might lurk in the heart of that fair flower, 
filled him with despair. 

Mrs. Wadman had run into her cottage 
shedding indignant tears at Dr. Porter’s cruel- 
ty. She came out again, with a triumphant 
air, carrying a tumbler of water, 

“ Just look at it, sir,” she said; “ look how 
bright and clear it is. There never was bet- 
ter water.” 

“My good woman, in this case brightness 
and clearness mean corruption,” said the 
doctor. “ If you’ll give me a pint of that 
water in a bottle. I’ll take it home with me 
and test it before I sleep to-night.” 


CHAPTER VI. 

All, pity! the lily is withered.” 


George Greswold left the dairy garden 
like a man stricken to death. He felt as if 
the hand of Fate vrere on him. It was not 
his fault that this evil had come upon him, 
that these poor people whom he had tried to 
help suffered by his bounty, were perhaps to 
die for it. He had done all that human fore- 
sight could do, but the blind folly of his serv- 
ants had stultified his wisdom. Nothing in a 
London slum could have been worse than this 
evil which had come about in a gentleman’s 
ornamental dairy, upon premises where mon- 
ey had been lavished to secure the perfection 
of scientific sanitation. 

Mr. Porter murmured some hopeful re- 
mark as they went back to the house. 

“Don’t talk about it. Porter,” Greswold | 
answered, impatiently. “Nothing could be j 


worse— nothing. Do all you can for these 
poor people — your uttermost, mind, your 
uttermost. Spare neither time nor money. 
Save them, if you can.” 

“You may be assured I shall do my best. 
There are only three or four very bad cases,” 

“Three or four! My God, how horrible! 
Three or four people murdered by the idiocy 
of my servants!” 

“Joe Stanning — not much chance for him. 
I’m afraid — and Polly Rainbow.” 

‘ ‘ Polly— poor pretty little Polly ! Oh, Por- 
ter, you must save her. You must perform 
a miracle, man. That is what genius means 
in a doctor. The man of genius does some- 
thing that all other doctors have pronounced 
impossible. You will have Pond over to- 
morrow, no doubt. He will help you.” 


30 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“If she lives till to-morrow. I’m afraid 
it’s a question of a few hours.” 

George Greswold groaned aloud. 

“ And my daughter has been drinking the 
same tainted milk. Will she be stricken, do 
you think?” he asked, with an awful calm- 
ness. 

“God forbid! Lola has such a fine con- 
stitution, and the surrounding circumstances 
are all different. I’ll go and have a look at 
my patients, and come back to you late in 
the evening with the last news.” 

They parted by a little gate at the corner 
of a thick yew hedge, which admitted Mr. 
Greswold into his wife’s flower-garden — a 
very old garden which had been the care and 
delight of many generations, a large square 
garden, with broad flower-beds on each side, 
a stone sundial in the centre of a grass-plot, 
and a buttressed wall at the end, a massive 
old wall of vermilion brickwork, honey- 
combed by the decay of centuries, against 
which a double rank of hollyhocks made a 
party-colored screen, while flaunting dragon’s- 
mouth and yellow stonecrop made a flame of 
color on the top. 

There was an old stone summer-house in 
each angle of that end wall, temples open to 
the sun and air, and raised upon three mar- 
ble steps, stained with the discoloration of 
ages. ♦ 

Charming as these antique retreats were to 
muse or read in, Mildred Greswold preferred 
taking tea on the lawn in the shadow of a 
mulberry-tree that looked old enough to have 
been coeval with Shakespeare’s tree in the 
garden of New Place. She was sitting in a 
low garden-chair, with a Japanese tea-table 
at her side, and a volume of Robertson’s ser- 
mons on her lap. 

It was a rule of life at Enderby Manor 
that only books of pious tendency should be 
read on Sundays. The religious library was 
varied and well chosen. Nobody ever found 
the books dull or the day too long. The 
dedication of that one day in seven to godli- 
ness and good works had never been an op- 
pression to Mildred Greswold. 

She remembered her mother’s Sundays— 
days of hasty church, and slow, elaborate 
dressing for afternoon or evening gayeties — 
days of church parade, and much talk about* 
other people’s gowns and other people’s con- 
duct — days of gadding about and running 


from place to place — Sunday luncheons, 
Sunday musical j^arties, Sunday expeditions 
up the river, Sunday in the studios, Sun- 
day at Richmond or Greenwich. Mrs. Gres- 
wold remembered the fussy emptiness of 
that fashionable Sunday, and preferred ser- 
mons and tranquil solitude in the manor 
gardens. 

Solitude meant a trinity of domestic love. 
Husband, wife, and daughter spent their 
Sundays together. Those were blessed days 
for the wife and daughter, since there were 
no business engagements, no Quarter Ses- 
sions, or interviews with the bailiff, or letter- 
writing, to rob them of the society they both 
loved best in the world. George Greswold 
devoted bis Sundays entirely to his Creator 
and his home. 

“Where is Lola?” he asked, surprised to 
find his wife alone at this hour. 

‘ ‘ She has a slight headache, and I per- 
suaded her to lie down for an hour or so.” 

The father’s face blanched. A word was 
enough in his overwrought condition. 

“Porter must see her,” he said, “and I 
have just let him leave me. I’ll send some 
one after him.” 

“My dear George, it is nothing; only one 
of her usual headaches.” 

“You are sure she was not feverish?” 

“I think not — it never occurred to me. 
She has often complained of headache since 
she began to grow so fast.” 

“Yes, she has shot up like a tall white 
lily— my lily,” murmured the father, tenderly. 

He sank into a chair, feeling helpless, hope- 
less almost, under that overpowering sense 
of fatality — of undeserved evil. 

“Dear George, you look so ill this after- 
noon,” said his wife, with tender anxiety, 
laying her hand on his shoulder and looking 
earnestly at him as he sat there in a down- 
cast attitude, his arms hanging loosely, his 
eyes bent upon the ground. “I’m afraid 
the heat has overcome you.” 

“Yes, it has been very hot. Do me a 
favor, Mildred. Go into the house and send 
somebody to find Porter. He was going the 
round of the cottages where there are sick 
people. He can easily be found. I want 
him to see Lola — at once.” 

“I’ll send after him, George; but indeed 
I don’t apprehend any need for a doctor. 
Lola is so strong. Her headaches pass like 


THE FATAL THREE. 


31 


summer clouds. Oh, George, you don’t think 
that she is going to have fever, like the cot- 
tagers?” cried Mrs. Greswold, full of a sud 
den terror. 

i “No, no; of course not. No, Mildred, 
i Why — why should she have the fever? But 
1 Porter might as well see her — at once — at 
I once. I hate delay in such cases.” 

His wife hurried away without a word. 

! He had imbued her with all his own fears. 

He sat in the garden, just as she had left 
I him, motionless, benumbed with sorrow. 
There might, indeed, be no ground for this 
chilling fear — others might die and his be- 
, loved might still go unscathed. But she had 
I been subjected to the same poison, and at 
1 any moment the same symptoms might show 
themselves. For the next week or ten days 
' he must be haunted by a hideous spectre. 

' He would make haste to get his dearest one 
away to the strong fresh mountain air, to the 
I salt breath from the German Ocean; but if 
the poison had already tainted that young 
life, mountain and sea could not save her. 
She must pass through the furnace, as those 
others were passing. 

“Poor little Polly Rainbow! The only 
, child of a widow — the only one — like mine,” 
he said to himself. 

He sat in the garden till dusk, brooding, 
praying dumbly, unutterably sad. The image 
!• of the widow of Nain was in his mind while 
he sat there. The humble funeral train; the 
, mourning mother ; and that divine face shin- 
i. ing out of the little group of peasant faces, 
radiant with intellect and faith — among them 
' but not of them — and the uplifted hand beck- 
’ oning the dead man from the bier. 

“ The age of miracles is past,” he thought; 
f “there is no Saviour in the land to help me. 
In my day of darkness heaven made no sign. 
I was left to suffer as the worms suffer under 
the ploughshare, and to wriggle back, to life 
as best I could, like them.” 

It was growing towards the summer dark- 
L ness when he rose and went into the house, 
where he questioned the butler, whom he 
met in the hall. Mr. Porter had been brought 
. back, and had seen Miss Greswold. He had 
. found her just a little feverish, and had 
ordered her to go to bed. Mrs. Greswold 
; was sitting with her. Did Dr. Porter seem 
jS anxious? No, not at all anxious, but he was 


going to send Miss Laura some medicine be- 
fore bedtime. 

It was after nine now, but Greswold could 
not stay in the house. He wanted to know 
how it fared with his sick tenantry — most of 
all with the little flaxen-haired girl he had 
so often noticed of late. 

He went out into the road that led to the 
village — a scattered colony — a cottage here 
and there — or a cluster of cottages and gar- 
dens on a bit of rising ground above the road. 
There was a common a little way from the 
manor, a picturesque, irregular expanse of 
hollows and hillocks, skirted by a few cot- 
tages, and with a fir plantation shielding it 
from the north. Mrs. Rainbow’s cottage 
stood between the common and the fir wood 
— an old half-timbered cottage, very low, 
with a bedroom in the roof, and a curious 
dormer-window, with a thatched arch above 
the lattice, like a projecting eyebrow. The 
little bit of garden was aflame with scarlet 
bean-blossom, roses, and geraniums, and the 
perfume of sweet-peas filled the air. 

Greswold heard the doctor talking in the 
upper chamber as he stood by the gate. The 
deep, grave tones were audible in the evening 
stillness, and there was another sound that 
chilled the squire’s heart, the sound of a 
woman’s suppressed weeping. 

He waited at the gate. He had not the 
nerve to go into the cottage and face that 
sorrowing widow. It seemed to him as if 
the child’s peril w’ere his fault. It was not 
enough that he had taken all reasonable 
precautions. He ought to have foreseen the 
idiocy of his servants. He ought to have 
been more on the alert to prevent evil. 

The great round moon came slowly up 
out of a cluster of Scotch firs. How black 
the branches looked against that red light! 
Slowly, slowly, sliding upward in a slanting 
line, the moon stole at the back of those 
black branches, and clfmhed into the open 
sky. 

How often Lola had watched such a moon- 
rise at his side, and with what keen eyes 
she had noted the beauty and the glory of 
the spectacle ! It was not that he had trained 
her to observe and to feel the loveliness of 
nature. With her it had been an instinct, 
born with her, going before the wisdom of 
maturity, the cultivated taste of travelled 
experience. 


32 


THE FATAL THREE. 


To-night she was lying in her darkened 
room, the poor head heavy and painful on 
the pillow. She would not see that exquisite 
moonrise yonder in that cloudless sky. 

“No matter, she will see it to-morrow, I 
hope,” he said to himself, trying to be cheer- 
ful. “I am a morbid fool to torment my- 
self— she has been subject to headaches of 
late. Mildred is right.” 

And then he remembered that death and 
sorrow were near — close to him as he stood 
there watching the moon. He remembered 
poor little Polly Rainbow, and grew despond- 
ent again. 

A shrill cry, a woman’s agonized shriek, 
broke the soft summer stillness, and pierced 
George Greswold’s heart. 

“ The child is dead,” he thought. 

Yes, poor little Polly was gone. The 
widow came out to the gate presently, sob- 
bing piteously, and clasped Mr. Greswold’s 
hand and cried over it, broken down by her 
despair, leaning against the gate-post, as if 
her limbs had lost the power to bear her up. 

“Oh, sir, she was my all,” she sobbed; 
“ she was my all.” 

She could say no more than this, but kept 
repeating it again and again. “ She was all 
I had in the world; the only thing I cared 
for.” 

George Greswold touched her shoulder 
with protecting gentleness. There was not 
a peasant in the village for whom he had not 
infinite tenderness — pitying their infirmities, 
forgiving their errors, inexhaustible in benev- 
olence towards them all. He had set him- 
self to make his dependants happy, as the 
first duty of his position. And he had done 
them evil unwittingly. He had cost this 
poor soul her dearest treasure — her ewe lamb. 

“Bear up if you can, my good soul,” he 
said. “ I know that it is hard.” 

‘ ‘ Ah, sir, you’d know it better if it was 
your young lady that was stricken down,” 
exclaimed the widow, bitterly, and the squire 
walked away from the cottage gate without 
another word. 

Yes, he would know it better then. His 
heart was heavy enough now. What would 
it be like if she were smitten? 

She was much the same next day, languid, 
with an aching head and some fever. She 
was not very feverish. On the whole, the 


doctor was hopeful, or he pretended to be so. 
He could give no positive opinion yet, nor 
could Dr. Pond. They were both agreed 
upon that point; and they were agreed that 
the polluted water in the garden well had 
been the cause of the village epidemic. 

Mr. Greswold hastened his preparations 
for the journey to Scotland with a feverish 
eagerness. He wrote to engage a sleeping- 
carriage on the Great Northern. They w'ere 
to travel on Thursday, leaving home before 
noon, and starting for the North in the even- 
ing. If Lola’s illness were indeed the slight 
indisposition which everybody hoped it was, 
she might be quite able to travel on Thursday, 
and the change of air and the movement 
would do her good. 

“She is always so well in Scotland,” said 
her father. 

No, there did not seem much amiss with 
* her. She was very sweet and cheerful, even 
I when her father went into her room to sit 
beside her bed for a quarter of an hour or 
so. The doctors had ordered that she should 
be kept very quiet, and a hospital nurse 
had been fetched from Salisbury to sit up 
at night with her. There w'as no necessity 
for such care, but it was well to do even a 
little too much where so cherished a life 
was at stake. People had but to look at the 
father’s face to know how precious that frail 
existence was to him. Nor was it less dear 
to the mother ; but she seemed less apprehen- 
sive, less bowed down by gloomy forebod- 
ings. 

Yes, Lola was quite cheerful for those few 
minutes in which her father sat by her side. 
The strength of her love overcame her weak- 
ness. She forgot the pain in her head, the 
weariness of her limbs, while he was there. 
She questioned him about the villagers. 

“How is little Polly going on?” she asked. 

He could not tell the truth. It would have 
hurt him too much to speak to her of death. 

“She is going on very well; all is ’well, 
love,” he said, deceiving her for the first time 
in his life. 

This was on Tuesday, and the preparations 
for Scotland were still in progress. Mr. 
Greswold’s talk with his daughter was all of 
their romantic Highland home, of the pic- 
nics and rambles, the fishing excursions and 
sketching parties they would have there. 
The nurse sat in a corner and listened to 


THE FATAL THREE. 


them with a grave countenance, and would 
not allow Mr. Greswold more than ten min- 
utes with his daughter. 

He counted the hours till they should be 
on the road for the North. There would be 
the rest of Tuesday and all Wednesday. She 
would be up and dressed on Wednesday, no 
doubt; and on Thursday morning the good 
old gra^arriage-horses would take them all 
off to Romsey Station, such a pretty drive 
on a summer morning, by fields and copses, 
with changeful glimpses of the silvery Test. 

Dr. Pond came on Tuesday evening, and 
found his patient not quite so well. There 
was a long conference between the two doc- 
tors, and then the nurse was called in to re- 
ceive her instructions; and then Mr. Greswold 
was told that the journey to Scotland must be 
put off for a fortnight at the very least. 

He received the sentence as if it had been 
his death-warrant. He asked no questions. 
He dared not. A second nurse was to be 
sent over from Southampton next morning. 
The two doctors had the cool, determined 
air of men who arc preparing for a battle. 

Lola was light-headed next morning; but 
with intervals of calmness and consciousness. 
She heard the church-bell tolling, and asked 
what it meant. 

“It’s for Polly Rainbow’s funeral,” an- 
swered the maid who was tidying the room. 


33 

“ Oh, no,” cried Lola, “ that can’t be. Fa- 
ther said she was better.” 

And then her mind began to wander, and 
she talked of Polly Rainbow as if the child 
had been in the room; talked of the little 
girl’s lessons at the parish school, and of a 
prize that she was to get. 

After that all was darkness, all was de- 
spair— a seemingly inevitable progress from 
bad to worse. Science, care, love, prayers— 
all were futile; and the bell that had tolled 
for the widow’s only child tolled ten days 
afterwards for Lola. 

It seemed to George Greswold as those 
slow strokes beat upon his brain, heavily, 
heavily, like minute-guns, that all the hopes 
and cares and joys and expectations life had 
held for him were over. His wife was on 
her knees in the darkened house from which 
the funeral train was slowly moving, and he 
had loved her passionately; and yet it seemed 
to him as if the open car yonder, with its 
coffin hidden under snow - white blossoms, 
was carrying away all that had ever been 
precious to him upon this earth. 

“She was the morning, with its promise 
of day,” he said to himself. “She was the 
spring-time, with its promise of summer. 
While I had her I lived in the future, hence- 
forward I can only live in the present; I dare 
not look back upon the past!” 


CHAPTER VIL 

DRIFTING APART. 


George Greswold and his wife spent the 
rest of that fatal year in a villa on the Lake 
of Thun, an Italian villa, with a campanello 
tower, and a long white colonnade, and stone 
balconies overhanging lawn and gardens, 
where the flowers grew in a riotous profu- 
sion. The villa was midway between two of 
the boat stations, and there was no other 
house near, and tliis loneliness was its chief 
charm for those two heart-broken mourners. 
They yearned for no sympathy, they cared 
for no companionship — hardly even that of 
each other, close as the bond of love had 
been hitherto. Each seemed to desire above 
all things to be alone with that great grief— 
3 


to hug that dear, sad memory in silence and 
solitude. Only to see them from a distance, 
from the boat yonder, as it glided swiftly 
past that flowery lawn and gracious villa, 
that paradise in little, an observer would have 
guessed at sorrow and bereavement from the 
mere attitude of either mourner— the man 
sitting with his head bent forward brooding 
on the ground, the unread newspaper lying 
across his knee— the woman on the other side 
of the lawn, beyond speaking distance, half 
reclining in a low basket - chair, with her 
hands clasped above her head, gazing at the 
distant line of snow mountains in listless va- 
cancy. The huge tan- colored St. Bernard, 


34 


THE FATAL THREE. 


snapping with his great cavern-like jaws at 
infinitesimal flies, was the only object that 
gave life to the picture. 

The boats went by in sunshine and cloud, 
the boats went by under torrential rain, which 
seemed to fuse lake and mountains, villas and 
gardens, into one watery chaos; the boats 
went by, and the days passed like the boats, 
and made no difference in the lives of those 
two mourners. Nothing could ever make 
any difference to either of them forevermore, 
it seemed to Mildred. It was as if some 
spring had broken in the machinery of life. 
Even love seemed dead. 

“ And yet he was once so fond of me, and 
I of him,” thought the wife, watching her 
husband’s face, with its curious look of ab- 
sence— the look of a window with the blind 
down. 

There were times when that look of utter 
abstraction almost frightened Mildred Gres- 
wold. It was an expression she had seen oc- 
casionally during her daughter’s lifetime, 
and which had always made her anxious. It 
was the look about which Lola used to say 
when they all met at the breakfast table — 
“Papa has had his bad dream again.” 

That bad dream was no invention of Lola’s, 
but a stern reality in George Greswold’s life. 
He would start up from his pillow in an ag- 
ony, muttering broken sentences in that voice 
of the sleeper which seems always different 
from his natural voice — as if he belonged to 
another world. Cold beads of sweat would 
start out upon his forehead, and the wife 
would put her arms round liim and soothe 
him as a mother soothes her friglitened child, 
until the muttering ceased and he sank upon 
his pillow exhausted, to lapse into quiet sleep, 
or else awoke and regained calmness in awak- 
ening. 

The dream — whatever it was— always left 
its mgrk upon him next day. It was a kind 
of nightmare, he told his wife, when she gen- 
tly questioned him, not urging her questions 
lest there should be pain in the mere recol- 
lection of that horrid vision. He could give 
no graphic description of that dream. It was 
all confusion — a blurred and troubled picture 
— but that confusion was in itself agony. 

Rarely were his mutterings intelligible — 
rarely did his wife catch half a dozen consec- 
utive words from those broken sentences; but 
once she heard him say, 


“The cage — the cage again! iron bars — 
like a wild beast!” 

And now that absent and cloudy look 
which she had seen in her husband’s face 
after the bad dream was there often. She 
spoke to him sometimes, and he did not 
hear. She repeated the same question twice 
or thrice, in her soft, low voice, standing 
close beside him, and he did not answer. 
There were times when it was difficult to 
arouse him from that deep abstraction; and 
at such times the utter blankness and soli- 
tude of her own life weighed upon her like 
a dead weight, an almost unbearable bur- 
den. 

“What is to become of us both in all the 
long years before us?” she thought, despair- 
ingly. “Are we to be always far apart — 
living in the same house, spending all our 
days together, and yet divided?” 

She had married before she was eighteen, 
and at one-and-thirty was still in the bloom 
of womanhood, younger than most women 
of that age, for her life had been subject to 
none of those vicissitudes and fevers which 
age women of the world. She had never 
kept a secret from her husband, never trem- 
bled at opening a milliner’s account, or blush- 
ed at the delivery of a surreptitious letter. 
The struggles for pre-eminence, the social 
race in which some women waste their ener- 
gies and strain their nerves, were unknown to 
her. She had lived at Euderby Manor as the 
flowers lived— rejoicing in the air and the 
sunshine, drinking out of a cup of life in 
which there mingled not one drop of poison. 
Thus it was that not one line upon the trans- 
parent skin marked the passage of a decade. 
The violet eyes had the limpid purity, and 
the sweet emotional lips the lender carnation 
of girlhood. Mildred Greswold was as beau- 
tiful at thirty-one as Mildred Fausset had 
been at seventeen. And yet it seemed to her 
that life was done, and that her husband had 
ceased to care for her. 

Many and many an hour in that lovely soli- 
tude beside the lake she sat with hands loose- 
ly clasped in her lap or above her head, with 
her books lying forgotten at her feet— all the 
newest books that librarians could send to 
tempt the jaded appetite of the reader— and 
her eyes gazing vacantly over the blue of the 
lake or the snow-peaks on the horizon. Of- 
ten in these silent musings she recalled the 


35 


THE FATAL THREE. 


past, and looked at the days that were gone 
as at a picture. 

She remembered just such an autumn as 
this, a peerless autumn spent with her father 
at The Hook — spent for the most part on the 
river and in the garden, the sunny days and 
moonlit nights being far too lovely for any 
one to waste in-doors. Her seventeenth birth- 
day was not long past. It was just ten years 
since she had come home to that house to find 
Fay had vanished from it, and to shed bitter 
tears for the loss of her companion. Never 
since that time had she seen Fay’s face. Her 
questions had been met coldly, angrily even, 


by her mother, and even her father had an- 
swered her with unsatisfactory brevity. 

All she could learn was that Fay had been 
sent to complete her education at a finishing- 
school at Brussels. 

“At school! Oh, poor Fay! I hope she is 
happy.” 

“She ought to be,” Mrs. Fausset answer- 
ed, peevishly. “The school is horridly ex- 
pensive. I saw one of the bills the other 
day. Simply enormous ! The girls are taken 
to the opera, and have all sorts of ridiculous 
indulgences.” 

“ Still, it is only school, mother, not home,” 
said Mildred, compassionately. 

This was two years after Fay had vanished. 
No letter had ever come from her to Mildred, 
though Mildred was able to write now, in her 
own sprawling, childish fashion, and would 
have been delighted to answer any such let- 
ter. She had herself indited various epis- 
tles to her friend, but had not succeeded in 
getting them posted. They had drifted to 
the waste - paper basket, mute evidences of 
wasted affection. 

As each holiday-time came round, the child 
asked if Fay were coming home, alwa3’’s to 
receive the same saddening negative. 

One day, when she had been more urgent 
than usual, Mrs. Fausset lost temper and an- 
swered sharply, 

“No, she is not coming — she is never 
coming. I don’t like her, and I don’t in- 
tend ever to have her in any house of mine, 
so you may as well leave off plaguing me 
about her.” 

“But, mother, why don’t you like her?” 

‘ ‘ Never mind why. I don’t like her. That 
is enough for you to know.” 

But, mother, if she is father's daughter 


and my sister, you ought to like her,” plead- 
ed Mildred, very much in earnest. 

“How dare you say that! You must not 
say it again. You are a naughty, cruel child 
to say such things!” exclaimed Mrs. Fausset, 
beginning to cry. 

“ Why naughty, why cruel? Oh, mother!” 
and Mildred cried too. She clasped her arms 
round her mother’s neck and sobbed aloud. 

“Dear mother, indeed I’m not naughty,” 
she protested ; ‘ ‘ but Bell said Fay was papa’s 
daughter. ‘Of course she’s his daughter,’ 
Bell said; and if she’s father’s daughter, she’s 
my sister, and it’s wicked not to love one’s 
sister. The psalm I was learning yesterday 
says so, mothen ‘ How good and how pleas- 
ant it is for brethren to dwell together in 
unity!’ And it means sisters just the same. 
Miss Colville said, when I asked her; and I 
do love Fay. I can’t help loving her.” 

“You must never speak her name again to 
me,” said Mrs. Fausset, resolutely. “I shall 
leave off loving you if you plague me about 
that odious girl.” 

“ Then wasn’t it true what Bell said?” 

“Of course not.” 

“Mother, would it be wrong for papa to 
have a daughter?” asked Mildred, perplexed 
by this mysterious resentment, for which she 
could understand no cause. 

‘ ‘ W rong ! It would be infamous!’" ■ ' 

“Would God be angry?” asked the child, 
with an awe-stricken look. “ Would it be 
wicked?” 

“ It would be the worst possible insult to 
me,” said Lord Castle-Connell’s daughter, ig- 
noring the minor question. 

After this Mildred refrained from all fur- 
ther speech about the absent girl to her moth- 
er; but as the years went by she questioned 
her father from time to time as to Fay’s 
whereabouts. 

“ She is very well off, my dear. You need 
not make yourself unhappy about her. She 
is with a very nice family, and has altogether 
pleasant surroundings.” 

“ Shall I never see her again, father?” 

“Never’s a long day, Mildred. I’ll take 
you to see her by-and-by when there is an 
opportunity. You see, it happens, unfortu- 
nately, that your mother does not like her, so 
it is better she should not come here. It 
would not be so pleasant for her —or for 
me.” 


36 


THE FATAL THREE. 


He said this gravely, with a somewhat de- 
jected look, and Mildred felt somehow that 
even to him it would be better to talk no 
more of her lost companion. 

As the years went by Mrs. Fausset changed 
from a woman of fashion to a nervous vale- 
tudinarian. It was not that she loved pleas- 
ure less, but her beauty and her health had 
both begun to dwindle and fade at an age 
when other women are in their prime. She 
fretted at the loss of her beauty — watched 
every wrinkle, counted every gray hair, la- 
mented over every change in the delicate 
coloring which had been her chief charm. 

“How pretty you are growing, Mildred!” 
she exclaimed once, with a discontented air, 
when Mildred was a tall, slender slip of four- 
teen. “You are j ust what I was at your age. 
And you will grow prettier every day until 
3^011 are thirty, and then you will begin to 
fade as I have done, and feel an old woman 
as I do.” 

It seemed to her that her own charms 
dwindled as her daughter grew. As the bud 
unfolded, the flower faded. She felt almost 
as if Mildred had robbed her of her beauty. 
She would not give up the pleasures and ex- 
citement of society. She consulted half a 
dozen fashionable physicians, and w’ould not 
obey one of them. They all prescribed the 
same repulsive treatment. Rest, early liours, 
country air, with gentle exercise-^o parties, 
no excitement, no strong tea. 

Mrs. Fausset disobeyed them all, and from 
only fancying herself ill grew to be really ill, 
and from chronic lassitude developed an or- 
ganic disease. 

She lingered nearly two years, a confirmed 
invalid, suffering a good deal, and giving oth- 
er people a great deal of trouble. She died 
soon after Mildred’s sixteenth birthday, and 
on her death-bed she confided freely in her 
daughter,who had attended upon her devoted- 
ly all through her illness, neglecting every- 
thing else in the world for her mother’s sake. 

“You are old enough now to understand 
things that must once have seemed very mys- 
terious to you, Mildred,” said Maud Fausset, 
lying half hidden in the shadow of muslin bed- 
curtains, with her daughter’s hand clasped 
in hers, perhaps forgetting how young that 
daughter was, in her own eagerness for s^mi- 
pathy. “ You couldn’t make out why I dis- 
liked that horrid girl so much, could you?” 


“No, indeed, mother.” 

“ I hated her because she was your father’s 
daughter, Mildred. His natural daughter. 
The child of some woman who was not his 
wife. You are old enough now to know 
what that means. You were reading the 
‘ Heart of Midlothian ’ to me last week. You 
know, Mildred?” 

Yes, Mildred knew. She hung her head 
at the memory of that sad story, and at the 
thought that her father might have sinned 
like George Staunton. 

“Yes, Mildred, she was the child of some 
woman he loved before he married me. He 
must have been desperately in love with the 
woman or he would never have brought her 
daughter into my liouse. It was the greatest 
insult he could offer to me.” 

“Was it, mother?” 

“Was it? Why, of course it was. How 
stupid you are, child!” exclaimed the invalid, 
peevishly, and the washed, feverish hand 
grew hotter as she tiilked. 

Mildred blushed crimson at the thought of 
this story of shame. Poor Fay — poor, un- 
happy Fay! And j^et her strong, clear com- 
mon-sense told her that there were two sides 
to the question. 

“It was not Fay’s fault, mother,” she said, 
geutl}". “No one could blame Fay, or be 
angry with her. And if the— wicked wom- 
an was dead, and father had repented, and 
was sorry, was it very wrong for him to 
bring my sister home to us?” 

“Don’t call her your sister!” exclaimed 
Mrs. Fausset, with a feeble scream of angry 
alarm; “she is not your sister— she is no re- 
lation— she is nothing to you. It was an in- 
sult to bring her across my threshold. You 
must be very stupid, or you must care very 
little for me, if you can’t understand that. 
His conduct proved that he had cared for 
that low, common woman— Fay’s mother- 
more than ever he cared for me— perhaps he 
thought her prettier than me,” said the in- 
valid, in hysterical parenthesis, “ and I have 
never known a happy hour since.” 

“Oh, mamma dear, not in all the years 
when you used to wear such lovely gowns 
and go to so many parties?” protested the' 
voice of common-sense. 

“I only craved for excitement because I 
was miserable at heart. I don’t think you 
can half understand a wife’s feelings, Mildred, 


THE FATAL THREE: 


37 


or you wouldn’t say such foolish things. I 
, wanted you to know this before my death, 
I want you to remember it always; and if 
ff. you meet that odious girl, avoid her as you 
would a pestilence. If your father should 
attempt to bring her here, or to Parchment 
^ Street, after I am gone—” 

I “He will not, mother. He will respect 
\ your wishes too much — he will be too sorry,” 
rf: exclaimed Mildred, bending down to kiss 
^ the hot, dry hand, and moistening it with 
a her tears. 

)| The year of mourning that began soon af- 
t ter this conversation was a very quiet inter- 
f, val for father and daughter. They travelled 
a little, spent six months in Leipsic, where 
. Mildred studied the piano under the most ap- 
proved masters, a couple of months in Paris, 
^ > where her father showed her all the lions in 
f a tranquil, leisurely way that was very pleas- 
ant, and then the}'- went down to The Hook, 
y and lived there in happy idleness on the river 
and in the gardens all through a long and 
lovely summer. 

Both were saddened at the sight of an emp- 
ty chair — one sacred corner in all the prettiest 
rooms — where Maud Fausset had been wont 
to sit, a graceful languid figure, robed in 
white, or some pale delicate hue even more 
beautiful than white in contrast with the 
background of palms and flowers, Japanese 
screen, or Indian curtain. How pretty she 
had looked sitting there with books and scent- 
bottles and dainty satin-lined basket full of 
!* some light frivolous work, which progressed 
* by stages of half a dozen stitches a day 1 Her 
^ fans, her Tennyson, her palms and perfumes 
t — all had savored of her own fragile bright- 
If colored loveliness. She was gone, and fa- 


ther and daughter w^ere alone together — 
deeply attached to each other, yet with a se^ 
cret between them, a secret which made a 
darkening shadow across the lives of both. 

Whenever John Fausset wore a look of 
troubled thought Mildred fancied he was 
brooding upon the past, thinking of that err- 
ing woman who had borne him a child, the 
child he had tried to fuse into his own family, 
and to whom her own childish heart had 
yearned as to a sister. 

“ It must have been an instinct that made 
me love her,” she said to herself, and then 
she would wonder idly what the fair sinner 
who had been Fay’s mother was like, and 
whether her father had really cared more for 
that frail woman than for his lawful wife. 

“Poor, pretty mamma! he seemed to dote 
upon her,” thought Mildred. “ I cannot im- 
agine his ever having loved any one as well. 
I cannot imagine his ever having cared for 
any other woman in this world.” 

The formless image of that unknown wom- 
an haunted the girl’s imagination. She ap- 
peared sometimes with one aspect, sometimes 
another — darkly beautiful, of Oriental type, 
like Scott’s Rebecca — or fair and lowly born 
like Effle Deans — poor, fragile Effle 1 fated to 
fall at the first temptation. Poetry and fic- 
tion were full of suggestions about that un- 
known influence in her father’s life; but ev- 
ery thought of the past ended in a sigh of 
pity for that fair wife whose happiness had 
been clouded over by that half-discovered 
mystery. 

Never a word did she breathe to her father 
upon this forbidden subject, never a word to 
Bell, who was still at the head of affairs in both 
Mr. Fausset’s houses, jind who looked like a 
grim and stony repository of family secrets. 


CHAPTER VIII. 

‘‘such things were.” 


Mildred had been motherless for a year 
when that new love began to grow wliich 
w'as to be stronger and closer than the love 
of mother or father, and which was to take 
possession of her life hereafter and transplant 
her to a new soil. 


How well slie remembered that summer 
afternoon on which she and George Gres- 
wold met for the first time! — she a girl of 
seventeen, fresh, simple-minded, untainted by 
that life of fashion and frivolity which she 
had seen only from the outside, looking on 


THE FATAL THREE. 


as a child at the follies of men and women 
— he her senior by thirteen years, and seri- 
ous beyond his age. Her father and his fa- 
ther had been friends at the University, and 
it was this old Oxford friendship wliich was 
the cause of George Greswold’s appearance 
at The Hook on that particular summer after- 
noon. Mr. Fausset had met him at Henley 
Regatta, had been moved by the memory of 
the past on discovering that Greswold was 
the son of George Ransome, of Magdalen, 
and had brought his friend’s son home to in- 
troduce to his daughter. If was not alto- 
gether without ulterior thought, perhaps, 
that he introduced George Greswold into his 
home. He had a theory that the young men 
of this latter day were for the most part a 
weak-kneed and degenerate race; and it had 
seemed to him that this tall, broad-shoulder- 
ed young man with the marked features, 
dark eyes, and powerful brow was of a 
stronger type than the. average bachelor. 

“A pity that he is rather too old for Mil- 
dred,” he said to himself, supposing that his 
daughter would hardly feel interested in a 
man who was more than five and-twenty. 

Mildred saw his face looking at her for the 
first time to-day in her desolation, as she sat 
idly beside the lake and heard the rhythmical 
beat of the paddle-wheels in the distance. 
That grave, dark face impressed her at once 
with a sense of power. She did not think 
the stranger handsome, or fascinating, or aris- 
tocratic, or elegant, but she thought of him a 
great deal, and she was silent and shy in his 
presence come as often as he might. 

He was in mourning for his mother, to 
whom he had been deeply attached, and who 
had died within the last three months, leav- 
ing him Enderby Manor and a large fortune. 
His home-life had not been happy. There 
had been an antagonism between him and 
his father from his boyhood upward, and 
he had shaken the dust of the paternal house 
off his feet, and had left England to wander 
aimlessly, living on a small income allowed 
him by his mother, and making a little mon- 
ey by literature. He was a second son, a 
person of no importance except to the moth- 
er who doted upon him. 

Happily for this younger son, his mother 
was a woman of fortune, and on her death 
George Ransome became heir to Enderby 
Manor, the old house in which generations 


of Greswolds had been born and died since 
Dutch William was King of England. There 
had been an old house pulled down to make 
room for that red -brick mansion, and the 
Greswolds had been lords of the soil since 
the Wars of the Roses — red-rose to the heart’s 
core, and loyal to an unfortunate king, wheth- 
er Plantagenet, Tudor, or Stuart. 

By the conditions of his mother’s will, 
George Ransome assumed her family name 
and crest, and became George Ransome Gres- 
wold in all legal documents henceforward; 
but he signed himself George Greswold, and 
was known to his friends by that name. He 
had not loved his father or his father’s race. 

He came to The Hook often in that glori- 
ous summer weather. At first he was grave 
and silent, and seemed oppressed by sad mem- 
ories; but this seemed natural in one who 
had so lately lost a beloved parent. Gradu- 
ally the ice melted, and his manner brighten- 
ed. He came without being bidden. He 
contrived to make himself, as it were, a mem- 
ber of the family, whose appearance sur- 
prised nobody. He bought a steam-launch, 
which was always at Mr. Fausset’s disposal, 
and Miss Fausset went everywhere with her 
father. She recalled those sunlit days now 
with every impression of the moment; the 
ever-growing sense of happiness; the silent 
delight in knowing herself beloved ; the 
deepening reverence for the man who loved 
her; the limitless faith in his power of heart 
and brain; the confiding love which felt a 
protection in the mere sound of his voice. 
Yes, those had been happy days — the rosy 
dawning of a great joy that was to last until 
the grave, Mildred Fausset had thought; and 
now, after thirteen years of wedded love, 
they had drifted apart. Sorrow, which should 
have drawn them nearer together, had served 
only to divide them. 

“Oh, my lamb, if you could know in your 
heavenly home how much your loss has cost 
us!” thought the mother, with the image of 
that beloved child before her eyes. 

There had been a gloomy reserve in 
George Greswold’s grief which had held his 
wife at a distance, and had wounded her 
sorrowful heart. He was selfish in his sor- 
row, forgetting that her loss was as great as 
his. He had bowed his head before inexo- 
rable fate, had sat down in dust and ashes, 
and brooded over his bereavement, solitary. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


39 


. despairing. If he did not curse God in his 
1 anguish, it was because early teaching still 
' prevailed, and the habits of thought he had 
learned in childhood were not lightly to be 
flung off. Upon one side of his character he 
' was a pagan, seeing in this affliction the hand 
of Nemesis, the blind and cruel avenger. 

They left Switzerland in the late autumn, 
and wintered in Vienna, where Mr. Greswold 
gave himself up to study, and where neither 
j lie nor his wife took any part in the gayeties 
of the capital. Here they lived quietly until 
I the spring, and then, even in the depths of 

' his gloom, a yearning came upon George 

Greswold to see the home of his race, the 
manor which he had loved as if it were a 
living thing. 

“ Mildred, do you think you could bear to 
be in the old home again?” he asked his wife, 
suddenly, one morning at breakfast. 

“I could bear anything better than the 
life we lead here,” she answered, her eyes 
filling with sudden tears. 

“ We will go back, then — yes, even if it is 
only to look upon our daughter’s grave.” 

They went back to England and to Euder- 
by Manor within a week after that conversa- 
tion. They arrived at Romsey Station one 
bright May afternoon, and found the gray 
horses waiting to carry them to the old house. 
How sad and strange it seemed to be coming 
home without Lola! She had always been 
their companion in such journeys, and her 
eager face and glad young voice, on the alert 
to recognize the first familiar points of the 
landscape — hill-top or tree or cottage— that 
indicated home, had given an air of gayety 
to every-day life. 

The old horses took them back to the 
manor, but not the old coachman. A great 
change in the household had come about 
after Lola’s funeral. George Greswold had 
been merciless to those servants whose care- 
lessness had brought about that great calam- 
ity, which made seven new graves in the 
church-yard before all was done. He dis- 
missed his bailiff, Mrs. Wadman and her 
husband, an under dairy-maid, cow-man, 
and his house keeper, all of whom he con- 
sidered accountable for the use of that foul 
water from the old well — accountable, inas- 
much as they had given him no notice of the 
evil, and had exercised no care or common- 
sense in their management of the dairy. 


These he dismissed sternly, and that party 
feeling which rules among servants took this 
severity amiss, and several other members of 
the household gave warning. 

“ Let it be a clean sweep, then,” said Mr. 
Greswold to Bell, who announced the falling 
away of his old servants. ‘ ‘ Let there be none 
of the old faces here when we come back next 
year— except yours. There will be plenty of 
time for you to get new people.” 

“A clean sweep” suited Ilell’s temper ad- 
mirably. To engage new servants who should 
owe their places to her, and bow themselves 
down before her, was a delight to the old 
Irishwoman. 

Thus it was that all things had a strange 
aspect when Mildred Greswold re-entered her 
old home. Even the rooms had a different 
air. The new servants had arianged the fur- 
niture upon new lines, not knowing that old 
order which had been a part of daily life. 

“Let us go and look at her rooms first,” 
said Mildred, softly, and husband and wife 
went silently to the rooms in the south wing — 
the octagon room with its dwarf bookcases 
and bright bindings, its proof engravings after 
Landseer— pictures chosen by Lola herself. 
Here nothing was changed. Bell’s own hands 
had kept all things in order. No unfamiliar 
touch had disturbed the relics of the dead. 

Mrs. Greswold stayed in that once happy 
scene for nearly an hour. It was hard to 
realize that she and her daughter were never 
to be together again, they who had been al- 
most inseparable — who had sat side by side 
by yonder window or yonder hearth in all 
the changes of the seasons. There was the 
piano at which they had played and sang to- 
gether. The music-stand still contained the 
prettily bound volumes — sonatinas by Hum- 
mel and dementi — easy duets by Mozart, 
national melodies, Volkes-Lieder. In music 
the child had been in advance of her years. 
With the mother music was a passion, and 
she had imbued her daughter with her own 
tastes in all things. The child’s nature had 
been a carrying on and completing of the 
mother’s character, a development of all the 
mother’s gifts. 

She was gone, and the mother’s life seemed 
desolate and empty — the future a blank. 
Never in her life had she so much needed her 
husband’s love — active, considerate, sympa- 
thetic— and yet never had he seemed so far 


40 


THE FATAL THREE. 


apart from her. It was not that he was un- 
kind or neglectful, it was only that his heart 
made no movement towards hers; he was not 
in sympathy with her. He had wrapped him- 
self in his grief as in a mantle ; he stood aloof 
from her, and seemed never to have under- 
stood that her sorrow was as great as his 
own. 

He left her on the threshold of Lola’s room. 
It might be that he could not endure the sight 
of those things which she looked at weeping, 
in an ecstasy of grief. To her that agony of 
touch and memory, the aspect of things that 
belonged to the past, seemed to bring her lost 
child nearer to her— it was as if she stretched 
her hands across the gulf and touched those 
vanished hands. 

“Poor piano!” she sighed; “poor piano, 
that she loved!” 

She touched the keys softly, playing the 
first few bars of “La ei dareni la uamo.” It 
was the first melody they had played together, 
mother and child — arranged easily as a duet. 
Later they had sung it together, the girl’s 
voice clear as a bird’s, and seeming to need 
training no more tlian a bird’s voice. These 
things had been, and were all over. 

“ What shall I do with my life?” cried 
the mother, despairingly; “what shall I 
do with all the days to come, now she is 
gone?” 

She left those rooms at last, locking the 
doors behind her, and went out into the gar- 
den. Tlie grand old cedars cast their broad 
shadows on the lawn. The decrepit old mul- 
berry stretched out his gnarled and crooked 
limbs. The rustic chairs and tables were 
there, as in the days gone by, when that vel- 
vet turf under the cedars had been Mrs. Gres- 
wold’s summer parlor. Would she sit there 
ever again, she wondered — could she endure 
to sit there without Lola? 

There was a private way from the manor 
gardens into the church-yard, a short-cut to 
church by which mother and daughter had 
gone twice on every Sunday ever since Lola 
was old enough to know what Sunday meant. 
She went by this path in the evening stillness 
to visit Lola’s grave. 

She gathered a few rose-buds as she went. 

“Buds for my bud,” she murmured, softly. 

All was still and solemn in the old church- 


yard shadowed by sombre yews — a church- 
yard of irregular levels and moss-grown mon- 
uments enclosed by rusty iron railings, and 
humbler head-stones of crumbling stone cov- 
ered over with an orange-colored lichen which 
was like vegetable rust. 

The names on these were for the most part 
illegible, the lettering of a fashion that has 
passed awa}^; but here and there a brand-new 
stone perked itself up among these old me- 
morials with an assertive statement about the 
dead. 

Lola’s grave was marked by a white mar- 
ble slab, with a dove in alto - rilievo. The 
inscription was of the simplest: 

“ Laura, the only child of George and Mil- 
dred Gresvvold, aged twelve.” 

There were no words of promise or of con- 
solation upon the stone. 

The grave was under a large mountain-ash, 
whose white blossotns and delicate leaves 
made a kind of temple above the marble slab. 
Mildred knelt down in the shadow of the 
foliage, and let her head droop over the cold 
stone. There was a skylark singing in the 
blue vault high above the old Norman tower 
— a carol of joy and glad young life, as it 
seemed to Mildred, sitting in the dust. What 
a mockery that joyousness of spring-time and 
nature seemed! 

She knew not how long she had knelt there 
in silent grief when the branches rustled sud- 
denly, as if a strong arm had parted them, and 
a man thing himself down heavil}’^ upon a turf- 
covered mound — a neglected, nameless grave 
— beside Lola’s monument. She did not stir 
from her kneeling attitude, or lift her head 
to look at the new-comer, knowing that the 
mourner was her husband. She had heard 
his footsteps approaching, heav’^y and slow, in 
the stillness of the place. 

The trunk of the tree hid her from that 
other mourner as she knelt there. He thought 
himself alone, and in the abandonment of that 
fancied solitude he groaned aloud, as Job 
may have groaned sitting among ashes. 

“Judgment!” he cried, “judgment!” and 
then after an interval of silence he cried again, 
“Judgment!” 

That one word so repeated seemed to freeze 
all the blood in her veins. What did it mciin, 
that exceeding bitter cry, “Judgment?” 


THE FATAL THREE. 


41 


f 

f 

CHAPTER IX. 

THE FACE IN THE CHURCH. 


Two montlisliad gone since that first visit 
to Lola’s grave, when the husband and wife 
had knelt so near each other and yet so far 
apart in the infinite mystery of human con- 
sciousness; he with his secret thoughts and 
secret woes wdiich she had never fathomed ; 
he unaware of her neighborhood; she chilled 
by a vague suspicion and sense of estrange- 
ment which had been growing upon her ever 
since her daughter’s death. 

It was summer again, the ripe, full-blown 
summer of mid -July. The awful anniver- 
sary of their bereavement had passed in si- 
lence and prayer. All things at Enderby 
looked as they had looked in the years that 
were gone, except the faces of the servants, 
which w'ere for the most part strange. That 
change of the household made a great change 
in life to people so conservative as George 
Greswold and his wife; and the old home 
seemed so much the less like home because 
of that change. The Sciuire of Enderby felt 
that his popularity was lessened in the village 
for which he had done so much. His severe 
dealing with the offenders had pleased no- 
body, not even the sufferers from the epidem- 
ic whose losses he had avenged, lie had 
shown himself implacable, and there were 
many wdio said he liad been unjust. 

“It was hard upon Wadman and his wife 
to be turned off after twenty years’ faithful 
service,” said the villagers. “The squire 
may go a long way before he’ll get as good a 
bailiff as Muster Thomas.” 

For the first time since he had inherited 
the estate George Greswold had felt himself 
surrounded by an atmosphere of discontent, 
and even dislike. His tenants seemed afraid 
of him, and were reticent and moody when 
he talked to them, which he did much sel- 
domer than of old, making a great effort 
over himself in order to appear interested in 
their affairs. 

Mildred’s life during those summer weeks, 
while the roses were opening and all the 
flowers succeeding one another in a proces- 


sion of loveliness, had drifted along like a 
slow, dull stream that flows sluggishly 
through a desolate swamp. There was nei- 
ther beauty nor color in her existence; there 
was a sense of vacuity, an aching void. Noth- 
ing to hope for, nothing to look back upon, 
since to remember the joys of the past was 
to drink the cup of bitterest grief. 

“ If I could learn to forget, I might learn 
to hope,” she told herself; but she had no 
expectation of ever learning either lesson. 

8he did not abandon herself slavishly to 
her sorrow. She tried to resume the life of 
duty which had once been so full of sweet- 
ness, so rich in its rewards for every service. 
She went about among the cottagers as of 
old, she visited the shabby gentilities on the 
fringe of the market-town, the annuitants 
and struggling families, the poor widows and 
elderly spinsters, who had quite as much 
need of help as the cottagers, and whom it 
had always been her delight to encourage 
and sustain with friendliness and sympathy, 
as well as with delicate benefactions — gifts 
that never humiliated the recipient. She 
took up the thread of her work in the parish 
schools; she resumed her old interest in the 
church services and decorations, in the in- 
evitable charity bazaar, or organ fund con- 
cert. She played her part in the parish so 
well that people began to say, 

“Mrs. Greswold is getting over her loss.” 

In him the shock had left a deeper mark. 
Ilis whole aspect was changed. He looked 
ten years older than before the coming of 
sorrow ; and though people loved her better, 
they pitied him more. 

“She has more occupations and pursuits 
to interest her,” said Mr. Rollinson, the cu- 
rate. “ She is devoted to music, and that 
employs her mind.” 

Yes, music was her passion, but in these 
days of mourning even music was allied to 
pain. Every melody she played, every song 
she sang, recalled the child whose apprecia- 
tion of that divine art had been far beyond 


43 


THE FATAL THREE. 


her years. They liad sung and played to- 
gether. Often singing alone in the summer 
dusk, in that corner of the long drawing- 
room wdiere Lola’s babyish chair still stood, 
she had started, fancying she heard that oth- 
er voice mingling with her own — the sw'eet, 
clear tones which had sounded seraphic even 
upon earth. 

Oh, was she with the angels now, or was 
it all a fable, that fond vision of a fairer 
world and an angelic choir singing before 
the Great White Throne? To have lost such 
a child w^as almost to believe in the world 
of seraphim and cherubim, of angels and 
purified spirits. Where else could she be? 

Husband and wife lived together, side by 
side, in a sad communion that seemed to 
lack the spirit of unity. The outward sem- 
blance of confiding affection was there, but 
there was something wanting. He was very 
good to her — as kind, as attentive, and con- 
siderate as in their first year of marriage; 
and yet there was something wanting. 

She remembered what he had been when 
he came as a stranger to The Hook, and it 
seemed to her as if the glass of time had 
been turned backward for fourteen years, 
and that he was again just as he had been 
in those early days when she had watched 
him, curiously interested in his character 
as in a mystery. He was too grave for a 
man of his years, and with a shade of gloom 
upon him that hinted at a more than com- 
mon grief. He had been subject to lapses 
of abstraction, as if his mind had slipped 
back to some unhapp}'^ past. It was only 
when he had fallen in love and was wholly 
devoted to her that the shadow passed away, 
and he began to feel the joyousness of life 
and the fervor of ardent hopes. Then the 
old character dropped off him like the ser- 
pent’s slough, and he became as young as the 
youngest — boyish even in his frank felicity. 

This memory of her first impressions about 
him was so strong with her that she could 
not help speaking of it one evening after 
dinner when she had been playing one of 
Beethoven’s grandest adagios to him, and 
they were sitting in silence, she by the piano, 
he far away by an open window on a level 
with the shadowy lawn, where the great 
cedars rose black against the pale gray sky. 

“George, do you remember my playing 
that adagio to you for the first time?” 


“ I remember you better than Beethoven. 
I could scarcely think of the music in those 
days for thinking so much of you.” 

“Ah, but the first time you heard me play 
that adagio was before you had begun to 
care for me — before you had cast your 
slough.” 

“ What do you mean?” 

“Before you had come out of your cloud 
of sad memories. When first you came to 
us you lived only in the past. I doubt if you 
were more than half-conscious of our exist- 
ence.” 

She could only distinguish his profile 
faintly defined against the evening gray as 
he sat beside the window. Had she seen the 
expression of his face, its look of infinite 
pain, she would hardly have pursued the 
subject. 

“ I had but lately lost my mother,” he said, 
gravely. 

“Ah, but that was a grief which you did 
not hide from us. You did not shrink from 
our sympathy there. There was some other 
trouble, something that belonged to a re- 
moter past, over which you brooded in se- 
cret. Yes, George, I know you had some 
secrets then that divided us, and — and — ” 
falteringly, with tears in her voice — “I think 
those old secrets are keeping us asunder 
now, when our grief should make us more 
than ever in unison.” 

She had left her place by the piano, and 
had gone to him as she spoke, and now she 
was on her knees beside him, clinging to him 
tearfully. 

“ George, trust me, love me,” she pleaded. 

“My beloved, do I not love you?” he pro- 
tested, passionately, clasping her in his arms, 
kissing away her tears, soothing her as if she 
had been a child. “My dearest and best, 
from the first hour I aw^akened to a new life 
in your love my truth has never wavered, 
my heart has never known change.” 

“And yet you are changed, since our dar- 
ling went, terribly changed.” 

“Do you wonder that I grieve for her?” 

“ No, but you grieve apart; you hold your- 
self aloof from me.” 

“ If I do it is because I do not want you 
to share my burden, Mildred. Your sorrow 
may be cured, perhaps; mine never can be. 
Time may be merciful to you; for me time 
can do nothing.” 


THE FATAL THREE. 


43 


“Dearest, what hope can there be for me 
that you do not share— the Christian’s hope 
of meeting our loved one hereafter? I have 
no other hope.” 

“I hardly know if I have that hope,” he 
answered, slowly, with deepest despondency. 

“And yet you are a Christian?” 

“If to endeavor to follow Christ, the teach- 
er and friend of humanity, is to be a Chris- 
tian — yes.” 

“And you believe in the world to come?” 

“I try so to believe, Mildred. I try. Faith 
in the Kingdom of Heaven does not come 
easily to a man whose life has been ruled by 
the inexorable fates. Not a word, darling; 
let us not talk of these things. We know no 
more than Socrates knew in his dungeon ; no 
more than Roger Bacon knew in his old age 
— unheard, buried, forgotten. Never doubt 
my love, dearest. That is changeless. You 
and Lola were the sunshine of my life. You 
shall be my sunshine henceforward. I have 
been selfish in my silent brooding over sor- 
row ; but it is the habit of my mind to grieve 
in silence — to drain the cup of affliction to 
the dregs. Forgive me, dear wife, forgive me. ” 

He clasped her in his arms, and again she 
felt assured of her husband’s affection; but 
she knew all the same that there was some 
sorrow in his past life which he had kept 
hidden from her, which he meant her never 
to know. 

Many a time in their happy married life 
she had tried to lead him to talk of his boy- 
hood and youth. About his days at Eton 
and Oxford he was frank enough, but he was 
curiously reticent about his home-life- and 
about those years which he had spent travel- 
ling about the Continent after he had left 
his father’s house for good. 

“I was not happy at home, Mildred,” he 
told her one day. “My father and I did not 
get on together, as the phrase goes. He was 
very fond of my elder brother. They had 
the same way of thinking about most things. 
Randolph’s marriage pleased my father, and 
he looked to Randolph to strengthen the 
position of our family, which had been con- 
siderably reduced by his own extravagance. 
He would have liked my mother’s estate 
to have gone to the elder son; but she had 
full disposing power, and she made me her 
heir. This set my father against me, and 
there came a time when, dearly as I loved 


my mother, I found that I could no longer 
live at home, I went out into the world 
a lonely man, and I only came back to the 
old home after my father’s death.” 

This was the fullest account of his family 
history that George Greswold had given his 
wife. From his reserve in speaking of his 
father she divined that the balance of wrong 
had been upon the side of the parent rather 
than of the son. Had a man of her hus- 
band’s temper been the sinner, he would 
have frankly confessed his errors. Of his 
mother he spoke with undeviating love; and 
he seemed to be on friendly terras with his 
brother. 

On the morning after that tearful talk in 
the twilight Mr. Greswold startled his wife 
from a pensive reverie as they sat at break- 
fast in the garden. They always breakfast- 
ed out-of-doors on fine summer mornings. 
They had made no change in old customs 
since their return, as some mourners might 
have done, hoping to blunt the keen edge of 
memory by an alteration in the details of 
life. Both knew too well how futile any 
such alteration of their surroundings would 
be. They remembered Lola no more vividly 
at Enderby than they had remembered her 
in Switzerland. 

“My dearest, I have been thinking of you 
incessantly since last night, and of the lone- 
liness of your life,” George Greswold began, 
seriously, as he sat in a low basket-chair, sip- 
ping his coffee, with his favorite setter, Kas- 
sandra, at his feet; an Irish dog that had been 
famous for feather in days gone by, but who 
had insinuated herself into the family affec- 
tions, and had got herself accepted as a house- 
hold pet to the ruin of her sporting qualities. 
Kassandra went no more with the guns; her 
place was the drawing-room or the lawn. 

“I can never be lonely, George, while I 
have you. There is no other company I can 
ever care about henceforward.” 

“Let me always be the first, dear; but you 
should have female companionship of some 
kind. Our house is empty and voiceless — 
there should be some young voice — some 
young footstep—” 

“ Do you mean that I ought to hire a per- 
son to run up and down stairs, and laugh in 
the corridors, as Lola used ? Oh, George, 
how can you I” exclaimed Mildred, begin- 
ning to cry. 


44 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“No, no, dear; I had no such thought in 
my mind. I was thinking of Randolph’s 
daughter. You seemed to like her when she 
and her sister were here two years ago.’.’ 

“Yes, she was a nice, bright girl then, and 
my darling was pleased with her. How mer- 
ry they were together, playing battlcdoor and 
shuttlecock over there by the yew hedge! 
Don’t ask me ever to see that girl again, 
George; it would make my heart ache.” 

“ I am sorry to hear you say that, Mildred. 
I was going to ask you to have her here on a 
good long visit. Now that Rosalind is mar- 
ried, Pamela has no home of her own. Rosa- 
lind and her husband like having her occa- 
sionally, for a month or six weeks at a time, 
but Sir Henry Mountford’s house is not Pa- 
mela’s home. She would soon begin to feel 
herself an incubus. The Mountfords are very 
fond of society, and just a little worldly; they 
would soon be tired of a girl whose presence 
was no direct advantage. I have been think- 
ing that with us Pamela would never be in 
the way. You need not see too much of her 
in this big house. There w^ould be plenty of 
room for her to carry on her own pursuits 
and amusements without boring you ; and 
when you wanted her she would be at hand 
— a bright, companionable girl, who would 
grow fonder of you every day.” 

‘ ‘ I could not endure her fondness. I could 
not endure any girl’s companionship. Her 
presence would only remind me of my 
loss.” 

“ Dearest, I thought we were both agreed 
that as nothing can make us forget our dar- 
ling, it cannot matter to us how often we arc 
reminded of her.” 

“ Yes, by silent, unreasoning things like 
Kassandra,” touching the dog’s tawny head 
with a caressing hand ; “or the garden — the 
trees and flowers she loved ; her books, her 
piano. Those things may remind us of our 
darling without hurting us, but to liear a 
girl’s voice calling me, as she used to call 
me from the garden on summer mornings— 
to hear a girl’s laughter — ” 

“ Yes, it would be painful, love, at first. 
I can understand that, Mildred. But if you 
can benefit an orphan girl by having her 
here, I know your kind heart will not re- 
fuse. Let her come for a few weeks, and if 
her presence pains you she shall stay no lon- 
ger; she shall not be invited again. I would 


not ask you to receive a stranger, but my 
brother’s daughter is near me in blood.” 

“ Let her come, George,” said Mildred, im- 
pulsively. “lam very selfish, thinking only 
of my own feelings. Let her come. How 
this talk of ours reminds me of something 
that happened when I was a child!” 

“What was that, Mildred?” 

“You have heard me speak of Fay, my 
playfellow?” 

“Yes.” 

“ I remember the evening my father asked 
mamma to let her come to us. It seemed 
just now as if you were using his very words 
— and yet all things were different.” 

Mildred had told him very little about that 
childish sorrow of hers. She had shrunk 
from any allusion to the girl whose existence 
bore witness against her father. She, too, 
fond and frank as she was, had kept her own 
counsel, and borne the burden of a secret. 

“ Yes, I have heard you speak of the girl 
you called Fay, and of whom you must have 
been very forfd, for the tears came into your 
eyes when you mentioned her. Did she live 
with you long?” 

“ Oh no, a very short time. She was sent 
to school, to a finishing-school, at Brussels.” 

“Brussels!” he repeated, with a look of 
surpiise. 

“ Yes; do j'ou know anything about Brus- 
sels schools?” 

“ Nothing personally. I have heard of girls 
educated there. And what became of 5'our 
playfellow after the Brussels school?” 

“ I never heard.” 

“ And you never tried to find out?” 

“ Yes, I asked my mother; but there was 
a prejudice in her mind against poor Fay. I 
would rather not talk about her, George.” 

Her vivid blush, her evident confusion, 
perplexed her husband. There was some 
kind of mystery, it seemed — some family 
trouble in the background, or Mildred, who 
was all candor, would have spoken more 
freely. 

“Then may I really invite Pamela?” he 
asked, after a brief silence, during which he 
had responded to the endearments of Kassan- 
dra, too well fed to have any design upon 
the dainties on the breakfast-table, and only 
asking to be loved. 

‘ ‘ I will write to her myself, George ; where 
is she ?” 


THE FATAL THREE. 


45 


“ Not very far off. She is at Cowes with 
the Mountfords, on board Sir Henry’s yacht, 
the Oadjly. You had better send your letter 
to the post-office, marked ‘ Gadfly.’ ” 

The invitation was despatched by the first 
post; Miss Greswold was asked to come to 
the manor as soon as she liked, and to stay 
till the autumn. 

The next day was Sunday, and Mr. and 
Mrs. Greswold went to church together by 
the path that led them within a stone’s-throw 
of Lola’s grave. 

For the first time since her daughter’s 
death Mildred had put on a light gown. Till 
to-day she had worn only black. This morn- 
ing she came into the vivid sunlight in a pale 
gray gown of some soft, thin, lustreless silk, 
and a neat little gray straw bonnet with black 
ribbons, which set off the fairness of her skin 
and the sheen of her golden hair. The sim- 
ple fashion of her gown became her tall, slim 
figure, which had lost none of the grace of 
girlhood. She was the prettiest and most 
distinguished - looking woman in Enderby 
Church, although there were more county 
families represented there upon that particu- 
lar Sunday than are often to be seen in a vil- 
lage church. 

The manor-house pew was on one side of 
the chancel, and commanded a full view of 
the nave.' The first lesson was long, and 
while it was being read Mildred’s eyes wan- 
dered idly along the faces in the nave, recog- 
nizing countenances that had been familiar 
to her ever since her marriage, until that list- 
lessly wandering gaze stopped suddenly, ar- 
rested by a face that was strange. , 

She saw this strange face between other 


faces — as it were, in a cleft in the block of 
people. She saw it at the end of a vista, 
with the sunlight from the chancel window 
full upon it— a face that impressed her as no 
face had ever done before. It looked like 
the face of Judas, she thought, and then in 
the next moment was ashamed of her foolish 
fancy. 

“It is only the coloring, and the effect of 
the light upon it,” she told herself; “I am 
not so weak as to cherish the vulgar preju- 
dice against that colored hair.” 

‘ ‘ That colored hair ” was of the color which 
a man’s enemies call red, and his friends au- 
burn or chestnut. It was of that ruddy brown 
which Titian has immortalized in more than 
one Venus, and without which Foti^jhar’s 
wife would be a nonentity. 

The stranger wore a small pointed beard 
of this famous coloring. His eyes were of a 
reddish-brown, large and luminous, his eye- 
brows strongly arched; his nose was a small 
aquiline; his brow was wide and lofty, slight- 
ly bald in front. His mouth was the only 
obviously objectionable feature; the lips were 
finely moulded, from a Greek sculptor’s stand- 
point, and would have done for a Greek Bac- 
chus, but the expression was at once crafty 
and sensual. The auburn mustache served 
to accentuate rather than to conceal that re- 
pellent expression. JMildred looked at him 
presently as he stood up for the “Te Deum.” 
He was tall, for she saw his head well above 
the intervening rows. He looked about five- 
and-thirty. He had the air of being a gen- 
tleman. 

“ Whoever he is, I hope I shall never see 
him again,” thought Mildred. 


CHAPTER X. 


THERE IS ALWAYS THE SKELETON. 


When Mr. and Mrs. Greswold left the 
church, the stranger was taking his place in 
the Hillersdon wagonette, a capacious vehi- 
cle, drawn by a pair of fine upstanding black- 
brown horses, set off by servants in smart liv- 
eries of dark brown and gold. 

Mildred gave a sigh of relief. If the 
Stranger was a visitor at Riverdale there was 


not much likelihood of his staying long in 
the neighborhood, or being seen again for 
years to come. The guests at Riverdale 
were generally birds of passage ; and the 
same faces seldom appeared there twice. Mr. 
and Mrs. Hillersdon, of Riverdale, were fa- 
mous for their extensive circle, and famous for 
bringing new people into the county. Some 


46 


THE FATAL THREE. 


of their neighbors said it was Mr. Hillersdon 
who brought the people there, and that Mrs. 
Hillersdon had nothing to do with the visit- 
ing list; others declared that husband and 
wife were both equally fickle and both equally 
frivolous. 

Riverdale was one of the finest houses 
within ten miles of Romsey, and it was vari- 
ously described by the local gentry. It was 
called a delightful house, or it was called a 
curious house, according to the temper of 
the speaker. Its worst enemy could not 
deny that it was a splendid house— spacious, 
architectural, luxurious, with all the append- 
ages of wealth and dignity— nor could its 
worst enemy deny its merit as one of the 
most hospitable houses in the county. 

NotAvithstanding this splendor and lavish 
hospitality, the local magnates did not go to 
Riverdale, and the Hillersdons were not re- 
ceived in some of the best houses. Tom 
Hillersdon was a large land-owner, a million- 
aire, and a man of good family; but Tom 
Hillersdon was considered to have stranded 
himself in middle-life by a marriage which 
in the outer world was spoken of vaguely 
as “unfortunate,” but which the straitlaced 
among his neighbors considered fatal. No 
man who had so married could hold up his 
head among his friends any more, no man 
who had so married could hope to have his 
wife received in decent people’s houses. In 
spite of which opinion prevailing among 
Tom Hillersdon’s oldest friends, Mrs. Hillers- 
don contrived to gather a good many people 
round her, and some of them the most dis- 
tinguished in the land. She had cabinet 
ministers, men of letters, and famous painters 
among her guests. She had plenty of women 
friends— of a sort ; attractive women, intel- 
lectual and enlightened women; sober ma- 
trons, bread -and -butter girls; women who 
doted on Mrs. Hillersdon, and, strange to 
say, had never heard her history. 

And yet Hillersdon’s wife had a history 
scarcely less famous than that of Cleopatra 
or Nell Gwynne. Louise Hillersdon was 
once Louise Lorraine, the young adventuress 
whose Irish gray eyes had set all London 
talking when the Great Exhibition of ’62 was 
still a skeleton, and when South Kensington 
was in its infancy. Louise Lorraine’s extrav- 
agance, and Louise Lorraine’s devotees, from 
German princes and English dukes down- 


ward, had been town-talk. Her box at the 
opera had been the cynosure of every eye; 
and Paris ran mad when she drove in the 
Bois, or exhibited her diamonds in the Rue 
Lepelletier; or supped in the small hours at 
the Cafe de Paris, with the topmost straw- 
berries in the basket. Numerous and con- 
flicting were the versions of her early history 
— the more sensational chronicles describing 
her as the Aphrodite of the gutter. Some 
people declared that she could neither read 
nor write, and could not stir without her 
amanuensis at her elbow ; others affirmed 
that she spoke four languages, and read 
Greek every night with her feet on the fender, 
while her maid brushed her hair. The sober 
truth lay midway between these extremes. 
She was the daughter of a doctor in a line 
regiment; she was eminently beautiful, very 
ignorant, and very clever. She wrote an un- 
educated hand, never read anything better 
than a sentimental novel, sang prettily, and 
could accompany her songs on a guitar with 
a good deal of dash and fire. To this may 
be added that she was an adept in the art of 
dress, had as much tact and finesse as a 
leader of the old French noblesse, and more 
audacity than a Parisian cocotte in the golden 
age of Cocotterie. Such she was when Tom 
Hillersdon, Wiltshire squire and millionaire, 
swooped like an eagle upon this fair dove, 
and bore her off to his eyrie. There was 
howling and gnashing of teeth among those 
many admirers who were all thinking serious- 
ly about making the lovely Louise a bona-fide 
offer; and it was felt in a certain set that 
Tom Hillersdon had done a valiant and vic- 
torious deed; but his country friends were 
of one accord in the idea that Hillersdon had 
wrecked himself forever. 

The squire’s wife came to Riverdale, and 
established herself there with as easy an air 
as if she had been a duchess. She gave her- 
self no trouble about the county families. 
London was near enough for the fair Louise, 
and she filled her house — or Tom Hillersdon 
filled it — with relays of visitors from the 
great city. Scarcely had she been settled 
there a week when the local gentry were 
startled at seeing her sail into church with 
one of the most famous English statesmen in 
her train. Upon the Sunday after, she was 
attended by a great painter and a well-known 
savant; and besides these she had a pew 


THE FATAL THREE. 


47 


full of smaller fry— a lady novelist, a fash- 
ionable actor, a celebrated Queen’s counsel, 
and a county member. 

“Where does she get those men?” asked 
Lady Marjorie Danefeld, the Conservative 
member’s wife; “surely they can’t all be— 
reminiscences.” 

It had been supposed while the newly 
wedded couple were on their honeymoon 
that the lady’s arrival at Riverdale would 
inaugurate a reign of profanity— that Sunday 
would be given over to bohemian society, 
cafe chantant songs, champagne, and cigar- 
ette smoking. Great was the surprise of the 
locality, therefore, when Mrs. Hillersdon ap- 
peared in the squire’s pew on Sunday morn- 
ing neatly dressed, demure — nay, with an as- 
pect of more than usual sanctity; greater still 
the astonishment when she reappeared in the 
afternoon, and listened meekly to the catechis- 
ing of the school children, and to the baptism 
of a refractory baby; greater even yet when 
it was found that these pious practices were 
continued, that she never missed a Saint’s- 
day service, that she had morning prayers 
for family and household, and that she held 
meetings of an evangelical character in her 
drawing-room — meetings at which curates 
from outlying parishes gathered like a flock 
of crows, and at which the excellence of the 
tea and coffee, pound-cake and muffins, 
speedily became known to the outside world. 

Happily for Tom Hillersdon, these pious 
tendencies did not interfere with his amuse- 
ments or the pleasantness of life. Riverdale 
was enlivened by a perennial supply of lively 
or interesting people. Notoriety of some 
kind was a passport to the Hillersdons’ fa- 
vor. It was an indication that a man was be- 
ginning to make his mark when he was ask- 
ed to Riverdale. When he had made his 
mark he might think twice about going, 
Riverdale was the paradise of budding celeb- 
rities. 

So to-day, seeing the auburn-haired stranger 
get into the Hillersdon wagonette, Mrs. Gres- 
wold opined that he was a man who had 
made some kind of reputation. He could 
not be an actor with that beard. He was a 
painter perhaps. She thought he looked 
like a painter. 

The wagonette was full of well-dressed 
women and well-bred men, all with an essen- 
tially metropolitan— or cosmopolitan —air. 


The eighteen- carat stamp of “county” was 
obviously deficient. Mrs. Hillersdon had 
her own carriage— a barouche — which she 
shared with an elderly lady, who looked as 
correct as if she had been a bishop’s wife. 
She was on bowing terms with Mrs. Gres- 
wold. They had met at hunt balls and char- 
ity bazaars, and at various other functions 
from which the wife of a local land-owner 
can hardly be excluded — even when she has 
a history. 

Mildred thought no more of the auburn- 
haired stranger after the wagonette had dis- 
appeared in a cloud of summer dust. She 
strolled slowly home with her husband by a 
walk which they had been in the habit of 
taking on fine Sundays after morning serv- 
ice, but which they had never trodden to- 
gether since Lola’s death. It was a round 
which skirted the common, and took them 
past a good many of the cottages, and their 
tenants had been wont to loiter at their gates 
on fine Sundays, in the hope of getting a pass- 
ing word with the squire and his wife. There 
had been something patriarchal, or clannish, 
in the feeling between landlord and tenant, 
laborer and master, which can only prevail in 
a parish where the chief land-owner spends 
the greater part of his life at home. 

To-day every one was just as respectful as 
of old; courtesies were as low and tones as 
reverential ; but George Greswold and his 
wife felt there was a difference, all the same. 
A gulf had been cleft between them and their 
people by last summer’s calamity. It was 
not the kindred of the dead in whom thia» 
coolness was distinguishable. The bereaved 
seemed drawn nearer to their squire by an 
affliction which had touched him too. But 
in Enderby parish there was a bond of kin- 
dred wffiich seemed to interlink the whole 
population. There were not above three fam- 
ily names in the village, and everybody was 
everybody else’s cousin, when not a nearer 
relative. Thus, in dismissing his bailiff and 
dairy people, Mr. Greswold ^had given um- 
brage to almost all his cottagers. He was 
no longer regarded as a kind master. A man 
who could dismiss a servant after twenty 
years’ faithful service was, in the estimation 
of Enderby parish, a ruthless tyrant — a mas- 
ter whose yoke galled every shoulder. 

“Him seemed to be so fond of us all,” 
said Luke Thomas, the village wheelwright, 


48 


THE FATAL THREE. 


brotlier of that John Thomas who had been 
Mr. Greswold’s bailiff, and who was now 
dreeing his weird in Canada; “and yet of- 
fend he, and him can turn and sack yer as if 
yer was a thief — sweep yer off his premises 
like a handful o’ rubbish. Faithful service 
don’t count with he.” 

George Gres wold felt the change from 
friendly gladness to cold civility. He could 
see the altered expression in all those famil- 
iar faces. The only sign of affection was 
from Mrs. Rainbow, standing at her cottage 
gate in decent black, with sunken cheeks 
worn pale by many tears. She burst out 
crying at sight of Mildred Greswold, and 
clasped her hand in a fervor of sympathy. 

“Oh, to think of your sweet young lady, 
ma’am! That you should lose her, as I lost 
my Polly!” she sobbed, and the two women 
wept together, sisters in affliction. 

“ You don’t think we are to blame, do you, 
Mrs. Rainbow?” Mildred said, gently. 

“No, no indeed, ma’am. We all know it 
was God’s will. We must kiss the rod.” 

“What fatalists these people arc!” said 
Greswold, as he and his wife walked home- 
ward by the sweet-smelling common, where 
the heather showed purple here and there, 
and where the harebells were beginning to 
dance upon the wind. “ Yes, it is god’s will; 
but the name of that god is Nemesis.” 

Husband and wife were almost silent dur- 
ing luncheon. Both were depressed by that 
want of friendliness in those who had been 
to them as familiar friends. To have forfeit- 
ed confidence and affection was hard, when 
they had done so much to merit both. Mil- 
dred could but remember how she and her 
golden - haired daughter had gone about 
among those people, caring for all their 
needs, spiritual and temporal, never ap- 
proaching them from the stand-point of su- 
periority, but treating them verily as friends. 
She recalled long autumn afternoons in the 
village reading-room, when she and Lola had 
presided over a bevy of matrons and elderly 
spinsters, she reading aloud to them while 
they worked, Lola threading needles to save 
elderly eyes, sewing on buttons, indefatiga- 
ble in giving help of all kinds to those vil- 
lage seamstresses. She had fancied that those 
mothers’ meetings, the story-books, and the 
talk had brought them all into a bond of af- 
fectionate sympathy ; and yet one act of stern 


justice seemed to have loosened the bond, 
and cancelled all obligations. 

Mr. Greswold lighted a cigar after lunch, 
and went for a ramble in those extensive 
copses which were one of the charms of En- 
derby Manor — miles and miles of woodland 
walks, dark and cool in the hottest day of 
summer — lonely foot-paths where the master 
of Enderby could think his own thoughts 
without risk of coming face to face with any 
one in that leafy solitude. The Enderby 
copses were cherished rather for pleasure 
than for profit, and were allowed to grow a 
good deal higher and a good deal wilder 
and thicker than the young wood upon neigh- 
boring estates. 

Mildred went to the drawing-room and to 
her piano, after her husband, her chief com- 
panion and confidant, now that she had not 
her Lola, was gone. Music was her passion 
— the only art that moved lier deeply ; and 
to sit alone, wandering from number to num- 
ber of Beethoven and Mozart, Bach or Men- 
delssohn, was the very luxury of loneliness. 

Adhering in all things to the rule that Sun- 
day was not as other days, she had her libra- 
ry of sacred music apart from other volumes, 
and it was sacred music only which she play- 
ed on Sundays. Her repertoire was large, 
and she roamed at will among the classic 
masters of the last two hundred years, but 
for sacred music Bach and Mozart were her 
favorites. 

She was playing a gloria by the latter com- 
poser, when she heard a carriage drive past 
the windows, and looked up just in time to 
catch a glimpse of a profile that startled her 
with a sudden sense of strangeness and fa- 
miliarity. The carriage was a light T-cart, 
driven by a groom in the Hillersdon livery. 

A visitor from Hillersdon was a novelty; 
for, although George Greswold and Tom Hil- 
lersdon were friendly in the hunting -field, 
Riverdale and the manor were not on visit- 
ing terms. The visit was for her husband, 
Mildred concluded, and she went on playing. 

The door was opened by the new footman, 
who announced “Mr. Castellani.” 

Mrs. Greswold rose from the piano to find 
herself face to face with the man whose coun- 
tenance, seen in the distance, in the light of 
the east window, had reminded her of Judas. 
Seen as she saw him now, in the softer light 
of the afternoon, standing before her with a 


THE FATAL THREE. 


49 


deprecating air in her own drawing-room, 
the stranger looked altogether different, and 
she thought he had a pleasing expression. 

He was above the middle height, slim, well 
dressed in a subdued metropolitan style, and 
he had an air of distinction and elegance 
which would have marked him anywhere as 
a creature apart from the common herd. It 
was not an English manner. There was a 
supple grace in his movements which sug- 
gested a Southern origin. There was a plead- 
ing look in the full brown eyes which sug- 
gested an emotional temperament. 

“An Italian, no doubt,” thought Mildred, 
taking this Southern gracefulness in con- 
junction with the Southern name. 

She wondered on what pretence this stmn- 
ger had called, and what could be his motive 
for coming. 

“Mrs. Greswold, I have to apologize hum- 
bly for presenting myself without having 
first sent you my credentials and waited for 
your permission to call,” he said, in very per- 
fect English, with only the slightest Milanese 
accent, and then he handed Mrs. Greswold an 
unsealed letter which he had taken from his 
breast-pocket. 

She glanced at it hastily, not a little embar- 
rassed by the situation. The letter w^as from 
an intimate friend, an amateur litterateur, 
who wrote graceful sonnets and gave pleas- 
ant parties. 

“I need not excuse myself, my dear friend, 
for making Mr. Castellan i known to you in 
the flesh, as I have no doubt he is already fa- 
miliar to you in the spirit. He is the anony- 
mous author of ‘Nepenthe,’ the book that 
almost every one has been reading, and quite 
every one has been talking about this season. 
Only the few can understand it; but you are 
of those few, and I feel assured your deepest 
feelings have been stirred by that wondrous 
work. How delicious it must be with you 
among green lanes and English meadows! 
We go to a land of extinct volcanoes for my 
poor husband’s gout. A vous de coeur, 

“Diana Tomkison.” 

“Pray sit down,” said Mildred, as she fin- 
ished her gushing friend’s note; “my hus- 
band will be in presently— I hope, in time to 
see you.” 

“Pardon me if, in all humility, I say it is 
4 


you I was especially anxious to see, to know, 
if it were possible — delightful as it will be also 
to know Mr. Greswold. It is with your name 
that my past associations are interwoven.” 

“Indeed! How is that?” 

“It is a long story, Mrs. Greswold. To 
explain the association I must refer to tlie 
remote past. My grandfather was in the 
silk trade, like your grandfather.” 

Mildred blushed, the assertion came upon 
her like an unpleasant surprise. It was a 
shock. That great house of silk merchants 
from which her father’s wealth had been de- 
rived had hardly ever been mentioned in her 
presence. Lord Castle - Connell’s daughter 
had never grown out of the idea that all 
trade is odious, and her daughter had almost 
forgotten that her father had ever been in 
trade. 

“ Yes, when the house of Fausset was in 
its infancy the house of Felix & Sons, silk 
manufacturers and silk merchants, was one of 
the largest on the hill-side of old Lyons. My 
great-grandfather was one of the richest men 
in Lyons, and he was able to help the clever 
young Englishman, your grandfather, w.ho 
came into his house as corresponding clerk, 
to perfect himself in the French language, 
and to find out what the silk trade was worth. 
He had a small capital, and when he had 
learned something about the trade, he estab- 
lished himself near St. Paul’s Church-yard as 
a wholesale trader in a very small way. He 
had no looms of his own in those days, and it 
was the great house of Felix, and the credit 
given him by that house, which enabled him to 
hold his own, and to make a fortune. When 
your father began life the house of Felix was 
on the wane. Your grandfather had estab- 
lished a manufactory of his own at L3mns. 
Felix & Sons had grown old-fashioned. They 
had forgotten to march with the times. They 
had allowed themselves to go to sleep, and 
they were on the verge of bankruptcy when 
your father came to their rescue with a loan 
which enabled them to tide over their diffi- 
culties. They had had a lesson, and they 
profited by it. The house of Felix recovered 
its ascendancy, and the loan was repaid be- 
fore your father retired from business.” 

“I am not surprised to hear that my fa- 
ther was generous. I should have been slow 
to believe that he could have been ungrate- 
ful,” said Mildred, softly. 


50 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“Your name is among my earliest recol- 
lections,” pursued Castellani; “my mother 
was educated at a convent at Roehampton, 
and she was very fond of England and Eng- 
lish people. The first journey I cau distinct- 
ly remember was a journey to London, wliich 
occurred when I was nine years old. I re- 
member my father and mother talking about 
Mr. Fausset. She had known him when she 
was a little girl, and he used to stay in her 
father’s house when he came to Lyons on 
business. She would like to have seen him 
and his wife and daughter for old times’ 
sake; but she had been told that his wife 
was a lady of rank, and that he had broken 
off all associations with his trading career. 
She was too diflident to intrude herself upon 
her father’s old ally. One day our carriage 
passed yours in the Park. Yes, I saw you, 
a golden-haired child — yes, madam, saw you 
with these eyes — and the vision has stayed 
with me, a sunny remembrance of my own 
childhood. I can see that fair child’s face in 
this room to-day.” 

“You should have seen my daughter,” fal- 
tered Mildred, sadly. 

“You have a daughter?” said the stran- 
ger, eagerly. 

“ I had a daughter. She is gone. I only 
put off my black gown yesterday; but my 
heart and mind will wear mourning for her 
till I go to my grave.” 

“Ah, madam, liow deeply I sympathize 
with such a grief,” murmured Castellani. 

He had a voice of peculiar depth and 
beauty — one of those rare voices wliose ev- 
ery tone is music. The pathos and compas- 
sion in those few commonplace words moved 
IVlildred to sudden tears. She commanded 
herself with an effort. 

“I am much interested in your reminis- 
cences,” she said, cheerfully. “My father 
was very dear to me. My mother came of an 
old Irish family, and the Irish, as you know, 
are apt to be over-proud of high birth. I 
had never heard my father’s commercial life 
spoken about until to-day. I only knew him 
as an idle man, without business cares of any 
kind, able to take life pleasantly. He used 
to spend two or three months of every year 
under this roof. It was a terrible blow to 
me when we lost him six years ago, and I 
think my husband mourned him almost as 
deeply as I did. But tell me about your 


book. Are you really the author of ‘ Nepen- 
the,’ that nameless author who has been so 
much discussed ?” 

“And who has been identified with so 
many distinguished people — Mr. Gladstone — 
Cardinal Newman.” 

“Mr. Fronde — Mr. Browning — I have 
heard all kinds of speculations. And is it 
really you?” 

“Yes, it is I. To you I may plead guilty, 
since, unfortunately, the authorship of ‘ Ne- 
penthe’ is now le secret de Polichimlle.'* 

“It is a — strange book,” said Mildred. 
“ My husband and I were both interested in 
it, and impressed by it. But your book sad- 
dened us both. You seem to believe in noth- 
ing.” 

“‘Seems,’ madam — nay, I know not 
‘seems;’ but perhaps I am not so bad as* 
you think me. I am of Hamlet’s temper, 
inquiring rather than disbelieving. To live 
is to doubt. And I own that I have seen 
enough of this life to discover that the rich- 
est gift fate can give to man is the gift of 
forgetfulness.” 

“I cannot think that. I would not for- 
get, even if I could. It would be treason to 
forget the beloved ones we have lost.” 

“Ah, Mrs. Gres wold, most men have worse 
memories than the memory of the dead. The 
wounds we want healed are deeper than those 
made by Death. His scars we can afford to 
look upon. There are wounds that have 
gone deeper, and that leave an uglier mark.” 

There was a pause. Mr. Castellani made 
no sign of departure. He evidently intended 
to wait for the squire’s return. Through the 
open windows of a second drawing-room, 

I divided from the first by an archway, they 
I could see the servants setting out the tea- 
table on the lawn. A Turkey earpet was 
spread under the cedar, and there were bas- 
I kel-cliairs of various shapes, and two or three 
I small wicker-tables of different colors, and a 
I milking-stool or two, and all the indications 
I of out door life. The one thing missing was 
I that aei ial figure clad in white which had been 
I wont to flit about among the dancing shad- 
ows of branch and blossom— a creature as 
evanescent as they, it seemed to that mourn- 
^ ing mother, who remembered her to-day. 

I “Are you staying long at Riverdalc ?” 
j asked Mildred, presently, by way of conver* 

1 sation. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


51 


** If Mrs. Hillersdon would be good enough 
to have me I would stay another fortnight. 
The place is perfect, the surrounding scenery 
enchanting, and my hostess simply delight- 
ful.” 

“You like her?” asked Mildred, interested. 

No woman can help being curious about a 
woman with such a history as Mrs. Hillers- 
don’s. All the elements of romance and 
mystery seem, from the feminine stand- 
point, to concentrate in such a career. How 
many hearts has such a woman broken! 
how many lives has she ruined! how often 
has she been on the brink of madness or sui- 
cide ! she, the placid matron, with her fat 
carriage-horses and powdered footmen and 
big prayer-book and demure behavior, and 
altogether bourgeoise surroundings. 

“ Like her? yes, she is such a clever wom- 
an!” 

“ Indeed!” 

“ Yes, she is a marvel. The very cleverest 
woman I know.” 

He laid a stress on the superlative. His 
praise might mean anything — might be a 
hidden sneer. He might pray as the devil 
prays — backward. Mildred had an uncom- 
fortable feeling that he was not in earnest. 

“Have you known her long?” she asked. 

“Not very long; only this season. I am 
told that she is fickle, or that other people 
are fickle, and that she seldom knows any 
one more than a season. But I do not mean 
to be fickle, I mean to be a house-friend at 
Riverdale all my life if she will let me. She 
is a very clever woman, and thoroughly ar- 
tistic.” 

Mildred had not quite grasped the modern 
significance of this last word. 

“ Does Mrs. Hillersdon paint?” she asked. 

“No, she does not paint.” 

“ She plays— or sings, I suppose?” 

“No. I am told she once sang Spanish 
ballads with a guitar accompaniment; but 
the people who remember her singing tell 
me that her arms were the chief feature in 
the performance. Her arms are lovely to 
this day. No, she neither paints, nor plays, 
nor sings* but she is supremely artistic. She 
dresses — well, as few women of five-and-forty 
know how to dress — dresses so as to make 
one think five-and-forty the most perfect age 
for a woman ; and she has a marvellous ap- 
preciation of art, of painting, of poetry, of 


acting, of music. She is almost the only 
woman to whom I have ever played Beet- 
hoven who has seemed to me thoroughly 
simpatica.” 

“Ah,” exclaimed Mildred, surprised, “ you 
yourself play, then?” 

“It is hardly a merit in me,” answered 
Castellani, modestly; “my father was one of 
the finest musicians of his time in Italy.” 

“Indeed!” 

“Vou are naturally surprised. His genius 
was poorly appreciated. His name was hard- 
ly known out of Milan and Brussels. Strange 
to say, those stolid Flemings appreciated 
him. His work was over the heads of the 
vulgar public. He saw such men as Verdi 
and Gounod triumphant while he remained 
obscure. ” 

“But surely you admire Verdi and Gou- 
nod?” 

“ In their places, yes; both are admirable; 
but my father’s plaCe was in a higher rank 
of composers. But let me not plague you 
about him. He is dead — and forgotten. He 
died crownless. I heard you playing Mozart’s 
Gloria as I came in. You like Mozart?” 

“ I adore him.” 

“Yes, I know there are still people who 
like his music. Chopin did ; asked for it on 
his death-bed,” said Castellani, with a wry 
face; as if he were talking of a vulgar pro- 
pensity for sauerkraut or a morbid hanker- 
ing for assafoetida. 

“How I wish you would play something 
while we are waiting for my husband!” said 
Mildred, seeing her visitor’s gaze wandering 
to the open piano. 

“If you will go into the garden and take 
your tea, I will play with delight while you 
take it. I doubt if I could play to you in 
cold blood. I know you are critical.” 

“And you think I am not simpatica,’' re- 
torted Mildred, laughing at him. She was 
quite at her ease with him already, all thought 
of that Judas face in the church being forgot- 
ten. His half-deferential, half-caressing man- 
ner, his easy confidences about himself and 
his own tastes, had made her more familiar 
with his individuality in the space of an hour 
than she would have been with the average 
Englishman in a month. She did not know 
whether she liked or disliked him; but he 
amused her, and it was a new sensation for 
her to feel amused. 


52 


THE FATAL THREE. 


She sauntered softly out to the lawn, and 
he began to play. 

Heavens, what a touch ! Was it really her 
piano which answered with tones so exquisite 
— which gave forth such thrilling melody? 
He played an improvised arrangement of 
Schubert’s Ave Maria, and she stood en- 
tranced till the last dying arpeggio melted 
into silence. No one could doubt that he 
came of a race gifted in music. 

“Pray, don’t leave the piano,” she said, 
softly, from her place by the open window. 

“I will play till you call me away,” he 
answered, as he began Chopin’s ^ltude in 
C-sharp minor. 

That weird and impassioned composition 
reached its close just as George Gres wold ap- 
proached from a little gate on the other side 
of the lawn. Mildred went to meet him, and 
Castellani left the piano and came out of the 
window to be presented to his host. 

Nothing could be more strongly marked 
than the contrast between the two men as 
they stood facing each other in the golden 
light of afternoon. Greswold, tall, broad- 
shouldered, rugged - looking in his rough 
brown heather suit and deer-stalking cap, car- 
rying a thick stick with an iron fork at the 
end of it, for the annihilation of chance weeds 
in his peregrinations. His fine and massive 
features had a worn look, his cheeks were 
hollow, his dark hair and beard were grizzled 
here and there, his dark complexion had lost 
the hue of youth. He looked ten years older 
than his actual age. 

Before him stood the Italian, graceful, gra- 
cious in every line and every movement; his 
features delicately chiselled, his eyes dark, 
full, and bright; his complexion of that milky 
pallor which is so often seen with hair tend- 
ing towards red, his brown beard of silkiest 
texture, his hands delicately modelled and of 
ivory whiteness, his dress imbued with all 
the grace which a fashionable tailor can give 
to the clothes of a man who cultivates the 
beautiful even in the barren field of nine- 
teenth-century costume. It was impossible 
that so marked a contrast could escape Mil- 
dred’s observation altogether ; yet she per- 
ceived it dimly. The picture came back to 
her memory afterwards in more vivid colors 

She made the necessary introduction, and 
then proceeded to pour out the tea, leaving 
the two men to talk to each other. 


“Your name has an Italian sound,” Gres- 
wold said, presently. 

“ It is a Milanese name. My father was a 
native of Milan. My mother was French, 
but she was educated in England, and all her 
proclivities were English. It was at her de- 
sire my father sent me to Rugby, and after- 
wards to Cambridge. Her fatal illness called 
me back to Italy immediately after I had got 
my degree, and it was some years before I 
again visited England.” 

“ AVere you in Italy all that time?” asked 
Greswold, looking down absently, and with 
an unwonted trouble in his face. 

Mildred sat at the tea - table, the visitor 
waiting upon her, insisting upon charging 
himself with her husband’s cup as well as his 
own — an attention and reversal of etiquette 
of which Mr. Greswold seemed unconscious. 
Kassandra had returned with her master from 
a long walk, and was lying at his feet in el- 
derly exhaustion. She saluted the stranger 
with a suppressed growl when he approached 
with the teacups. Kassandra adored her 
own people, but was not remarkable for civil- 
ity to strangers. 

“Yes, I wasted four or five years in the 
South — in Florence, in Venice, or along the 
Riviera — wandering about like Satan, not 
having made up my mind what to do in the 
world.” 

Greswold was silent, bending down to play 
with Kassandra, who wagged her tail with a 
gentle largo movement, in grateful content- 
ment. 

“You must have heard my father’s name 
when you were at Milan,” said Castellani. 
“His music was fashionable there” 

Mildred looked up with a surprised expres- 
sion. She had never heard her husband talk 
of Milan, and yet this stranger mentioned his 
[ residence there as if it were an established 
fact. 

“How did you know I was ever at Milan?” 
asked Greswold, looking up sharply. 

“For the simplest of reasons. I had the 
honor of meeting you on more than one oc- 
casion at large assemblies, where my insignifi- 
cant personality would hardly impress itself 
upon your memory. And I met you a year 
later at Lady Lochinvar’s palace at Nice, soon 
after your first marriage.” 

Mildred looked up at her husband. He 
was pale as ashes, his lips whitening as she 


THE FATAL THREE. 


53 


gazed at him. She felt her own cheeks pal- 
ing; felt a sudden coldness creeping over her, 
as if she were going to faint. She watched 
her husband dumbly, expecting him to tell 
this man that he was mistaken, that he was 
confounding him, George Greswold, with 
some one else; but Greswold sat silent, and 
presently, as if to hide his confusion, bent 


again over the dog, who got up suddenly and 
licked his face in a gush of affection — as if 
she knew — as if she knew ! 

He had been married before, and he had 
told his wife not one word of that first mar- 
riage. There had been no hint of the fact 
that he was a widower when he asked John 
Fausset for his daughter’s hand. 


CHAPTER XI. 

THE BEGINNING OF DOUBT. 


Enderby Church clock struck six. They 
heard every chime, slow and clear in the 
summer air, as they sat in the broad shadow 
of the cedar, silent all three. 

It seemed as if the striking of the clock 
were the breaking of a spell. 

“ So late?” exclaimed Castellani, in a cheery 
voice; “and I promised Mrs. Hillersdon to 
be back in time to drive to Romsey for the 
evening service. The old Abbey Church of 
Romsey, she tells me, is a thing to dream 
about. There is no eight o’clock dinner at 
Riverdale on Sundays. Every one goes to 
church somewhere, and we sup at half-past 
nine, and after supper there is sometimes 
extempore prayer— and sometimes there are 
charades or dumb crambo. C'estselon. When 
the prince was there they had dumb crambo. 
Good-by. I am almost ashamed to ask if I 
may ever come again, after having burdened 
you for such an unconscionable time.” 

He had the easiest air possible, and seemed 
totally unconscious of any embarrassment 
caused by his allusions to the past; and yet 
in both faces, as he looked from one to the 
other, he must have seen the strongest indi- 
cations of trouble. 

Mrs. Greswold murmured something to the 
effect that she would be glad to see him at 
any time, a speech obviously conventional 
and unmeaning. Mr. Greswold rose hastily 
and accompanied him to the hall door, where 
the cart still waited for him, the groom fixed 
as a statue of despondency. 

Mr. Castellani was inclined to be loquacious 
to the last. Greswold was brief almost to 
incivility. He stood watching the light cart 
roll away, and then w^ent slowly back to the 
garden and to his seat under the cedar. 


He seated himself there in silence, li^oking 
earnestly at his wife, whose drooping head 
and fixed attitude told of deepest thought. 
So they sat for some minutes in dead silence, 
Kassandra licking her master’s pendent hand, 
as he leaned forward with his elbow on his 
knee, infinitely sorry for him. 

Mildred was the first to break that silence. 

“George, why did you not tell me,” she 
began, in a low, faltering voice, “that I was 
not your first wife? What reason could 
there be for concealment between you and 
me? I so trusted you, I so loved you, noth- 
ing you could have told would have changed 
me.” 

“Dearest, there was one reason, and a 
powerful one,” answered George Greswold, 
firmly, meeting the appealing look of her 
eyes with a clear and steady gaze. “My 
first marriage is a sad remembrance for me, 
full of trouble. I did not care to tell you 
that miserable story, to call a dreaded ghost 
out of the grave of the past. My first mar- 
riage was the one great sorrow of my life, 
but it was only an episode in my life. It left 
me as lonely as it found me. There are very 
few who know anything about it. I am 
sorry that young man should have come here 
to trouble us with his unnecessary reminis- 
cences. For my own part, I cannot remem- 
ber having ever seen his face before.” 

“I am sorry you should have kept such a 
secret from me,” said Mildred. “It would 
have been so much wiser to have been can- 
did. Do you think 1 should not have respect- 
ed your sad remembrances? You had only to 
say to me ‘ Such things were, but let us not 
talk of them.’ It would have been more 
manly— it would have been kinder to me.” 


54 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“Say that I was a coward, if you like — 
that I am still a coward, where those mem- 
ories are concerned,'’ said Greswold. 

The look of agony in his Lice melted her 
in a moment. She threw herself on her 
knees beside his chair, she and the dog fawn- 
ing upon him together. 

“Forgive me, forgive me, dearest,” she 
pleaded. “ I shall never speak to you of this 
again. Women are so jealous — of the past, 
most of all.” 

“ Is that all?” ho said. “ God knows you 
have little need. Let us say po more, Mil- 
dred. The past is past ; neither you nor I 
can alter it. Memory is inexorable. God 
himself cannot change it.” 

“I will contrive that Mr. Castellani shall 
not come here again, George, if you object 
to see him.” 

“Pray, don’t trouble yourself. I would 
not have such a worm suppose that he could 
be obnoxious to me.” 

“Tell me what you think of him,” she 
asked,*in a lighter tone, anxious to bring 
back the easy mood of every-day life. “ He 
seems very clever, and he is rather hand- 
some.” 

“ What do I think of the trumpet ash on 
the veranda yonder? A beautiful parasite, 
which will hold on anywhere in the sun- 
shine. Mr. Castellani is of the same family, 
I take it — studies his own interests first, and 
chooses his friends afterwards. He will do 
admirably for Riverdale.” 

“He plays divinely. His touch trans- 
formed my piano.” 

“He looks the kind of man who would 
play the piano,” said Greswold, with ineffa- 
ble contempt, looking down at his own sun- 
burnt hands, hardened by exposure to all 
weathers, broadened by handling gun and 
punt-pole, and by half a dozen other forms 
of outdoor exercise. “However, I have no 
objection to him, if he serves to amuse you 
and Pamela.” 

He spoke with a kind of weary indiffer- 
ence, as of a man who cared for very little in 
life ; and then he rose slowly, took up his 
stick, and strolled off to the shrubbery. 

Pamela appeared on the following after- 
noon with boxes, bags, music-books, rackets, 
and parasols, in a proportion which gave 
promise of a long visit. She had asked as a 


tremendous favor to be allowed to bring Box 
— otherwise Fitz-Box — her fox-terrier, son of 
Sir Henry Mountford’s Box, great grandson 
of Brockenhurst Joe, by that distinguished 
animal’s daughter, Lyndhurst Jessie, and on 
the father’s side a lineal descendant of Mr. 
Murchison’s Cracknel. 

“I hope you won’t mind very much,” she 
wrote; “but it would be death to him if I 
were to leave him behind. To begin with, 
his brother Fitz-Cox, who has a villanous 
temper, would inevitably kill him ; and be- 
sides that he would pine to death at not 
sleeping in my room at night, which he has 
done ever since he was a puppy. If you will 
let me bring him, I will answer for his good 
manners, and that he shall not be a trouble 
to any one. ” 

The descendant of Brockenhurst Joe rush- 
ed out into the garden, and made a lightning 
circuit of lawn and shrubberies, while his 
young mistress was kissing her aunt Mil- 
dred, as she called her uncle’s wife in the 
I fulness of her affection. 

“It is so very good of you to have me, 
and I am so delighted to come,” she said. 

Mildred would have much preferred that 
she were anywhere else, yet could not help 
feeling kindly to her. She was a frank, 
bright-looking girl, with brown eyes, and al- 
most flaxen hair — a piquant contrast, for the 
hair was genuine, and carried out in the eye- 
brows, which were only just a shade darker. 
Her complexion was fair to transparency, and 
she had just enough soft rosy bloom to light 
up the delicate skin. Her nose was slightly 
retrousse, her mouth was a little wider than 
she herself approved, but her teeth -were per- 
fection. She had a charming figure of the 
plump order, but its plumpness was a distress 
to her. 

“Don’t you think I get horribly stout?” 
she asked Mildced, when she was sitting at 
tea in the garden presently. 

“ You may be a little stouter than you were 
at sixteen, perhaps, but not at all too stout.” 

“ Oh , but I am. I know it, I feel it. Don’t 
endeavor to spare my feelings, aunt. It is 
useless. I know I am fat. Rosalind says I 
ought to marry; but I tell her it’s absurd. 
How can anybody ever care for me, now I 
am fat? They would only want my money 
if they asked me to marry them,” concluded 
Pamela, clinging to the plural. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


55 


“ My dear Pamela, do you want me to tell 
you that you are charming and all that you 
ought to be?” asked Mildred, laughing. 

“ Oh no, no, I don’t want you to spare my 
feelings. Everybody spares one’s feelings. 
One grows up in ignorance of the horrors in 
one’s appearance because people will spare 
one’s feelings. And then one sees one’s self in 
a strange glass — or a boy in the street says 
something, and one knows the worst. I 
think I know the worst about myself. That 
is one comfort. IIow lovely it is here!” said 
Pamela, with a sudden change of mood, 
glancing at Mildred with a little pathetic 
look, as she remembered the childish figure 
that was missing, must be forever missing, 
from that home picture. 

“I am so glad to be with you,” she mur- 
mured, softly, nestling up to Mildred’s side, 
as they sat together on a rustic bench; “let 
me be useful to you, let me be a companion 
to 3'^ou, if you can.” 

“You shall be both, dear.” 

“ How good to say that! And j^ou won’t 
mind Box?” 

“Not the least. If he will be amiable to 
Kassandra.” 

“ He will. He has been brought up among 
other dogs. We are a very doggy family at 
the Hall. Would 3'^ou think he was worth a 
Imndred and fifty guineas?” asked Pamela, 
with ill-concealed pride, as the scion of illus- 
trious progenitors came up and put his long 
lean head in her liand, and conversed with 
her in a series of expressive snorts, as it were 
a conversational code. 

“I hardly know what constitutes perfec- 
tion in a fox-terrier.” 

“ No more do I; but I know he is perfect. 
He is said to be the image of Cracknel, only 
better. I tremble when I think that my 
possession of him hangs by a thread. He 
might be stolen at any moment.” 

“You must l)e careful.” 

“Yes, I cannot be too careful. Here comes 
Uncle George, ’’said Pamela, rising and run- 
ning to meet Mr. Greswold. “Oh, Uncle 
George, how altered you are!” 

She was alwa3^s saying the wrong thing, 
after the manner of impulsive girls; and she 
was quick-witted enough to discover her mis- 
take the instant after. 

Happily, the dogs furnished a ready diver- 
sion. She introduced Box, and expatiated 


upon his grand qualities. She admired and 
made friends with Kassandra, and then set- 
tled down almost a slightly as a butterfly 
in spite of her plumpness, on a Japane.se 
stool, to take her teacup from Mildred’s 
hands. 

She was perfectly at her ease by this time, 

I and told her uncle and aunt all about her 
i sister Rosalind, and Rosalind’s husband. Sir 
i Henry Mountford, whom she summed up 
I lightl3" as a nice old thing, and no end of 
fun. It was easy to divine from her dis- 
course that Rainham Hall was not an espe- 
cially intellectual atmosphere, not a school 
of advanced thought, or of any other kind of 
thought. Pamela’s talk was of tennis, yacht- 
ing, fishing, and shooting, and of the people 
who shared in those sports. She seemed to 
belong to a world in which nobod3’^ ever sat 
down except to eat, or stayed in doors except 
under stress of weather. 

“ I hear you have all manner of clever peo- 
ple in 3mur neighborhood,” she said, by-and- 
by, having told all she had to tell about Rain- 
ham. 

“Have we?” asked Greswold, smiling at 
her intensity. 

“ Yes, at Riverdale. They do say the au- 
thor of ‘ Nepenthe ’ is staying there — and that 
he is not a Roman cardinal — or an English 
statesman — biit almost a 3'^oung man — an Ital- 
ian by birth— and very handsome. I would 
give worlds to see him.” 

“It is not unlikely you may be gratified 
without giving anything,” answered her un- 
cle. “ Mr. Castellani was here yesterday af- 
ternoon, and threatened to repeat his visit.” 

“ Castellani! Yes, that is the name I heard. 
What a pretty name! And what is he like? 
Do tell me all about him. Aunt Mildred.” 

She turned to the woman as the more like- 
ly to give her a graphic descrii)tiou. The 
average man is an undescribing animal. 

Mildred made an effort at self-command 
before she spoke. Castellani counted for but 
little in her recent trouble. His revelation 
had been an accident, and its effect entirely 
dissociated from him. Yet the very thought 
of the man troubled her, and the dread of 
seeing him again was like a physical pain. 

“I do not know what to say about his 
appearance,” she answered, presently, slowly 
fanning herself with a great scarlet Japanese 
fan, pale and cool-looking in her plain white 


56 


THE FATAL THREE. 


gown with its black ribbons. The very pict- 
ure of domestic peace, one would suppose, 
judging by externals only. “I suppose there 
are people who would think him handsome.” 

“Don’t you, aunt?” 

“No. I don’t like the color of his eyes or 
of his hair. They are of that reddish brown 
which the Venetian painters are so fond of, 
but which always gives me an idea of false- 
hood and treachery. Mr. Castellan! is a very 
clever man, but he is not a man whom I could 
ever trust.” 

“ How nice!” cried Pamela, her face radi- 
ant with enthusiasm; “a creature with red- 
brown hair, and eyes with a depth of false- 
hood in them. That is just the kind of man 
who might be the author of ‘Nepenthe.’ If 
you had told me he was stout and rosy-cheek- 
ed, with pepper and salt whiskers and a fine, 
benevolent head, I would never have opened 
his book again.” 

“ You seem to admire this ‘Nepenthe ’ pro- 
digiously,” said her uncle, looking at her with 
a calmly critical air. “ Is it because the book 
is the fashion, or from your own unassisted 
appreciation of it? I did not think you were 
a bookish person.” 

“I’m not,” cried Pamela. “I am a mass 
of ignorance. I don’t know anything about 
science. I don’t know the name of a single 
butterfly. I don’t know one toadstool from 
another. But when I love a book it is a pas- 
sion with me. My Keats has tumbled to 
pieces. My Shelley is disgracefully dirty. 

I have read ‘ Nepenthe ’ six times, and I am 
waiting for the cheap edition, to keep it un- 
der my pillow. It has made me an agnos- 
tic.” 

‘ ‘ Do you know the dictionary meaning of 
that word?” 

“I don’t think I do, but I know I am an 
agnostic. ‘Nepenthe’ has unsettled all my 
old beliefs. If I had read it four years ago I 
should have refused to be confirmed. I am 
dying to know the author.” 

“You like unbelievers, then?” 

“I adore men who dare to doubt, who are 
not afraid to stand apart from their fellow- 
men.” 

“On a bad eminence?” 

“Yes, on a bad eminence. "What a sweet 
expression ! I can never understand Goethe’s 
‘Gretchen.’” 

“Why not?” 


I “How could she have cared for ‘Faust,’ 
when she had the privilege of knowing 
Mephistopheles?” 

Pamela Ransome had established herself in 
her pretty bedroom and dressing-room, and 
had supervised her maid while she unpacked 
and arranged all her belongings before dinner- 
time. She came down to the drawing-room 
at a quarter to eight as thoroughly at her 
ease as if she had lived half her life at En- 
derby Manor. She was the kind of visitor 
who gives no trouble, and who drops into 
the right place instinctively. Mildred Gres- 
wold felt cheered by her presence in spite of 
that bitter and ever-recurrent pang of memo- 
ry which brought back that other image of 
the sweet girl-child who should have grown 
to womanhood under that roof, and who was 
lying a little way off under the ripening ber- 
ries of the mountain ash, and in the deep 
shadow of a century-old yew. 

They were very quiet in the drawing-room 
after dinner, Greswold reading in a nook 
apart by the light of his own particular lamp; 
his wife bending over an embroidery-frame 
in her corner near the piano, where she had 
her own special dwarf bookcase and her 
work-basket and the bonheur du jour, at 
which she sometimes wrote letters, her own 
little table scattered with old family min- 
iatures by Angelica Kaufmann, Cosway, and 
Ross, and antique watches in enamelled 
cases, and boxes of porcelain and gold and 
silver, every one of which had its associa- 
tions and its history. Every woman who 
lives much at home has some such corner, 
where the very atmosphere is full of home- 
thoughts. She asked her niece to pla}^ and 
to go on playing as long as she liked; and 
Pamela, pleased with the touch of the fine 
concert grand, rang the changes upon Cho- 
pin, Schumann, Raff, and Brahm, choosing 
those compositions which least jarred upon 
the atmosphere of studious repose. 

Mildred’s needle moved slowly as she sat 
in her low chair, with her hands in the 
lamplight and her face in shadow, moved 
very slowly, and then stopped altogether, 
and the white hands lay idle in her lap, 
and the embroidery - frame, with its half- 
finished group of azaleas, slid from her 
knee to the ground. She was thinking — 
thinking of that one subject which had 
possessed her thoughts since yesterday after- 


THE FATAL THREE. 


57 


noon, which had kept her awake through 
the brief darkness of the summer night, and 
in the slow hours betwixt dawn and the en- 
trance of the maid with the early cup of tea, 
which marked the beginning of the daily 
routine. In all those hours her thoughts had 
revolved round that one theme with an in- 
tolerable recurrence. 

It was of her husband’s first marriage she 
thought, and of his motive for silence about 
that marriage — that he who, in the whole 
course of their wedded lives, had been the 
very spirit of single-minded candor should 
3'et have suppressed this all-important event 
in his past history was a fact in itself so 
startling and mysterious that it might well 
be the focus of a wife’s troubled thoughts. 
He could not so have acted without some 
all-sufficient reason; and what manner of 
reason could that have been which had in- 
fluenced him to conduct so entirely at vari- 
ance with his own character? 

“I know that he is truthful, high-minded, 
the soul of honor,” she told herself; “and 
yet there is a tacit falsehood in such a course 
as he has taken which seems hardly compat- 
ible with honor.” 

What was there in the historj’’ of that mar- 
riage which had sealed his lips, which made 
it horrible to him to speak about it, even 
when fair dealing with the girl who was to 
be his wife should have constrained frank- 
ness? 

Had he been cursed with a wicked wife — 
some beautiful creature who had caught his 
heart in her toils as a cat catches a bird, and 
had won him only to betray and to dishonor 
him? Had she blighted his life, branded 
him with the shame of a forsaken husband ? 

And then a hideous dread floated across 
her mind. What if that first wife were still 
living— divorced from him? Had she, Mil- 
dred Fausset, severely trained in the strictest 
principles of the Anglican Church, taught 
her creed by an ascetic who deemed divorce 
unchristian and an abomination, and who 
had always refused to marry those who had 
been divorced — had she, in whose life and 
mind religion and duty were as one feeling 
and one principle — had she been trapped 
into a union with a man whose wife yet 
lived, and in the sight of God was yet one 
with him — a wife who might crawl penitent 
to his feet some day, and claim him as her 


own again by the right of tears and prayers 
and a soul cleansed from sin? Such a sin- 
ner must have some hold, some claim even 
to the last upon the man who once was her 
husband— who once swore to cherish her 
and cleave to her — of whom it had once been 
said, “And they two shall be one flesh.” 

No; again and again no. She could not be- 
lieve George Greswold capable of such deep 
dishonor as to have concealed the existence 
of a divorced wife. No, the reason for that 
mysterious silence must be another reason 
than this. 

She had sinned against him, it might be, 
and had died in her sin, under circumstances 
too sad to be told without infinite pain ; and 
he, who had never in her experience shown 
himself wanting in moral courage, had in 
this one crisis of his life acted as the coward 
acts. He had kept silence where conscience 
should have constrained him to speak. 

And then the wife’s vivid fancy conjured 
up the image of that other wife. Jealous 
love for the husband depicted that wife of 
past yeare as a being to be loved and remem- 
bered until death; beautiful, fascinating, gift- 
ed with all the qualities that charm man- 
kind, the superior of the second wife. That 
poor, jealous heart ached with a sick long- 
ing to know the worst. “ He can never care 
for me as he once cared for her,” Mildred 
told herself. “ She was his first love.” 

His first; the first revelation of what love 
means to the passionate heart of youth. 
What a world there is in that ! Mildred re- 
membered how a new life began for her with 
the awakening of her love for George Gres- 
wold. What a strange, sweet enchantment, 
what an intoxicating gladness which changed 
and glorified the whole face of nature! The 
river, and the reedy islets, and the pollard 
willows, and the autumn sunset — things so 
simple and familiar — had all taken new col- 
ors in that magical dawn of her first love. 

She — that unknown woman — had been 
George Greswold’s first love. Mildred en- 
vied her that brief life, whose sole distinction 
was to have been loved by him. 

“Why do I imagine a mystery about her?’" 
she argued, after long brooding. “The only 
secret was that he had loved her as he could 
never love me, and he feared to tell me as 
much lest I should refuse the remnant of a 
heart. It was out of kindness to me that he 


THE FATAL THREE. 


58 

kept silence. It would have pained me too 
much to know how she had been loved.” 

She knew that her husband was a man of 
exceeding sensitiveness; she knew him capa- 
ble of almost woman-like delicacy — intense 
fear of wounding other people’s feelings. 
Was it altogether unnatural that such a man 
should have held back the history of his first 
marriage, with its passionate love, its heart- 
broken ending, from the enthusiastic girl 
who had given him all her heart, and to 
whom he could give so little in return? 

“He may have seen how I adored him, 
and may have married me half out of pity,” 
she said to herself, finally, with unspeakable 
bitterness. 


Yet, if this were so, could they have been 
so happy together, so' completely united- 
save in that one secret of the past, that one 
dark regret which had revealed itself from 
time to time in an agonizing dream? He had 
walked that dark labyrinth of sleep alone 
with his sorrow; there she could not follow 
him. 

She remembered the awful sound of those 
broken sentences — spoken to shadows in a 
land of shadow. She remembered how acute- 
ly she had felt his remoteness as he sat up 
in bed, pale as death, his eyes open and fixed, 
his lips muttering. He and tlie dead were 
face to face in the halls of the past. She had 
no part in his life, or in his memory. 


CHAPTER XIL 

‘^SHE CANNOT BE UNWORTIIY.” 


Mu. Castellani did not wait long before 
he availed himself of Mrs. Greswold’s per- 
mission to repeat his visit. He appeared 
on Friday afternoon, at the orthodox hour 
of half-past three, when Mildred and her 
niece were sitting in the drawing-room, ex- 
hausted by a long morning at Salisbury, 
•where they had explored the cathedral, and 
lunched in the Close with a clever friend 
of George Greswold’s who had made his 
mark on modern literature. 

“I adore Salisbury Close,” said Pamela, 
as she looked through the old-fashioned win- 
dow to the old-fashioned garden, ‘ ‘ it reminds 
me of Honoria.” She did not deem it nec- 
essary to explain what Honoria she meant, 
presuming a universal acquaintance with 
Coventry Patmore’s gentle heroine. 

The morning had been sultry, the home- 
ward drive long, and both ladies were rest- 
ing in comfortable silence, each with a book, 
when Mr. Castellani was announced. 

Mildred received him rather stiffly, trying 
lier uttermost to seem thoroughly at ease. 
She introduced him to her niece, Miss Ran- 
some. 

“The daughter of the late Mr. Gilbert Ran- 
some, and the sister of Lady Mountford?” Cas- 
tellani inquired presently, when Pamela had 
run out on the lawn to speak to Box. 


“Yes. You seem to know everybody’s 
belongings.” 

“Why not? It is the duty of every man 
of the world, more especially of a foreigner. 

I know Mr. Ransome’s place in the Sussex 
Weald — a very fine property, and I know 
that the two ladies are co-heiresses, but that 
the Sussex estate is to descend to the eldest 
son of the elder daughter, or failing male 
issue there, to the son of the younger. Lady 
Mountford has a bab}’^ son, I believe.” 

“Your information is altogether correct.” 

“Why should it be otherwise? Mr. Hill- 
ersdon and his wife discussed the family his- 
tory to-day at luncheon, apropos to Miss 
Ransome’s appearance in Romsey Church at 
the Saint’s-day service yesterda)’". ” 

His frankness apologized for his imperti- 
nence, and he •was a foreigner, which seems 
always to excuse a great deal. 

Pamela came back again, after rescuing 
Box from a rough-and-tumble game with 
Kassandra. She looked rosy and breathless 
and very pretty in her pale-blue gown and 
girlish sash flying in the wind, and flaxen 
hair fluffed into a feathery pile on the top of 
her head, and honest brown eyes. She re- 
sumed her seat in the deep old window be- 
hind the end of the piano, and made believe- 
I to go on with some work, which she took ia 


THE FATAL THREE. 


59 


a tangled heap from a very untidy basket. 
Already Pamela had set the sign of her pres- 
ence upon the drawing-rooms at Enderby, a 
trail of various litter which w^as a part of her 
individuality. Screened by the piano, she 
was able to observe Castellani, as he stood 
leaning over the large central ottoman, with 
his knee on the cushioned seat, talking to 
Mrs. Greswold. 

He w^as the author of “Nepenthe.” It 
was in that charaeter he interested her. She 
looked at him with the thought of his book 
full in her mind. It was one of those half 
mad, wholly artificial compo.sitions which 
delight girls and young men, and which are 
just clever enough, and have just enough 
originality, to get talked about and written 
about by the cultured few. It was a love 
story, ending tragicall}'^— a story of ruined' 
lives and broken hearts, told in the autobio- 
graphical form, with a careful disregard of 
all conventional ornament, which gave an 
air of reality where all was inherently false. 
Pamela thought it must be Castellani’s own 
story. She fancied she could see the traces 
of those heart-breaking experiences, those 
crushing disappointments, in his countenance, 
in his bearing even, and in the tones of his 
voice, which gave an impression of mental | 
fatigue, as of a man worn out by a fatal pas- 
sion. 

The story of “Nepenthe” w'as as old as 
the hills — or at least as old as the Boulevard 
des Capucines and the Palais Royal. It was j 
the story of a virtuous young man’s love for ' 
an unvirtuous woman — the story of Deme- 
trius and Lamia — the story of a man’s de- 
moralization under the influence of incarnate 
falsehood, of the gradual lapse from good to 
evil, the gradual extinction of every belief 
and every scruple, the final destruction of 
a soul. 

The wicked siren was taken, her victim 
was left: but left to expiate that miserable i 
infatuation by an after-life of musing; left | 
without a joy in the present or a hope in the 
future. 

“He looks like it,” thought Pamela, re- 
membering that final chapter. 

Mrs. Greswold was putting a few slow 
stitches into the azalea leaves on her em- 
broidery-frame, and listening to Mr. Castel- 
lani with an air of polite indifference. 

“Do you know that Riverdalc is quite the 


I most delightful house I have ever stayed in?” 
[he said; “and I have slayed in a great 
' many. And do you know that IVIrs. Hillers- 
, don is heart-broken at your never having 
’ called upon her?” 

I “I am sorry so small a matter should 
touch Mrs. Hillersdon’s heart.” 

“She feels it intensely. She told me so 
yesterday. Perfect candor is one of the 
j charms of lier character. She is as emotion- 
I al and as transparent as a child. Why have 
I you not called on her?” 

“ You forget that Riverdalc is sev^cn miles 
from this house.” 

“Does not your charity extend so far? 
Are people who live seven miles off beyond 
the pale? I think you must visit a little 
farther afield than seven miles. There must 
be some other reason.” 

“There is another reason, which I had 
rather not talk about.” 

“I understand. You consider Mrs. Hill- 
ersdon a person not to be visited. Long 
ago, when you were a child in the nursery, 
Mrs. Ilillersdon was an undisciplined, inex- 
perienced girl, and the world used her hard- 
ly. Is that old history never to be forgot- 
ten? Men, who know it all, have agreed to 
forget it ; why should women, who only know 
a fragment, so obstinately remember?” 

“I know nothing and remember nothing 
about Mrs. Ilillersdon, My friends are for 
the most part those of my husband’s choice, 
and I pay no visits without his approval. 
He does not wish me to visit at Riverdalc. 
You have forced me to give a plain answer, 
Mr. Castellani.” 

“Why not? Plain truth is always best. 
I am sorry Mr. Greswold has interdicted my 
charming friend. You can have no idea how 
excellent a wbman she is, or how admirable 
a wife. Tom Ilillersdon might have searched 
the county from border to border and not 
have found as good a w'oman — looked at as 
the woman best calculated to make him 
happy. And what delightful people she has 
brought about him I One of the most inter- 
esting men I ever met arrived yesterday, and 
is to preach the hospital sermon at Romsey 
next Sunday. He is an old friend of yours.” 

“A clergyman, and an old friend of mine, 
at Riverdalc?” 

“A man of ascetic life and extraordinary 
culture. I never heard any man talk of 


THE FATAL THREE. 


60 

Dante better than he talked to me last night 
in a moonlight stroll on the terrace, while 
the other men were in the smoking-room.” 

“Surely you do not mean Mr. Cancellor, 
the Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s, Parchment 
Street?” 

“That is the man — Clement Cancellor, 
Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s. He looks like a 
medisBval monk just stepped out of one of 
Perrugini’s altar-pieces.” 

“ He is the noblest, most unselfish of men; 
he has given his life to doing good among 
rich and poor. It is so long since I have 
seen him! We have asked him to Enderby 
very often, but he has always been too busy 
to come. And to think that he should be 
coming to this neighborhood and I know 
nothing about it; and to think that he should 
go to Riverdale rather than come here!” 

“ He had hardly any option. It was Mrs, 
Hillersdon who asked him to preach on Hos- 
pital Sunday. She extorted a promise from 
him three months ago in London. The 
Vicar of Romsey was enchanted. ‘You 
•are the cleverest woman I know,’ he said. 

‘ No one else could have got me such a great 
gun.’” 

“A great gun— Mr. Cancellor a great gun? 
I can only think of him as I knew him when 
I was twelve years old, a tall, thin young 
man in a very shabby coat — he was curate 
at St. Elizabeth’s then— very gaunt and hol- 
low-cheeked, but with such a sweet smile. 
He used to come twice a week to teach me 
the history of the Bible and the Church. 
He made me love both.” 

“He is gaunt and hollow-cheeked still, 
very tall and bony and sallow, and he still 
■wears a shabby coat. You will not find 
much difference in him, I fancy — only so 
many more years of hard work and self-sac- 
rifice, ascetic living, and nightly study. A 
man, to know Dante as he does, must have 
given years of his life to that one poet; and 
I am told that in literature Cancellor is an 
all-round man. His monograph on Pascal 
is said to be the best of a brilliant series of 
such studies.” 

“ I hope he will come to see his old pupil 
before he leaves the neighborhood.” 

“He means to do so. He was talking of 
it yesterday evening — asking Mrs. Hillers- 
don if she was intimate with you — so awk- 
ward for poor Mrs. Hillersdon !” 


“ I shall be very glad to see him again,” 
said Mildred, gently. 

‘ ‘ May I drive him over to tea to-morrow 
afternoon?” 

“ He will be welcome here at any time.” 

“Or with any one? If Mrs. Hillersdon 
were to bring him, would you still refuse to 
receive her?” 

“I have never refused to receive her. We 
have met and talked to each other on public 
occasions. If Mr. Cancellor likes her, she 
cannot be unworthy.” 

“May she come with him to-morrow?” 
persisted Castellani. 

“If she likes,” faltered Mildred, w’onder- 
ing that any w^oman could so force an en- 
trance to another woman’s house. 

She did not know that it was by such en- 
trances Mrs. Hillersdon had made her w^ay 
in society, until half the best houses in Lou- 
don had been opened to her. 

“ If you are not in a hurry to leave us, I 
know my niece would much like to hear you 
play,” she said, feeling that the talk about 
Riverdale had been dull work for Pamela. 

Miss Ransome murmured assent. 

“If you will play something of Beetho- 
ven’s,” she entreated. 

“ Do you object to Mozart?” he asked, for- 
getting his depreciation of the valet-musi- 
cian ’s son a few days before. “ I feel more 
in the humor for that prince of dramatists. 

I will give you the supper in ‘ Don Gio- 
vanni.’ You shall see Leporcllo trem- 
bling. You shall hear the tramp of ghostly 
feet.” 

And then, improvising upon a familiar 
theme, he gave his own version of that w'on- 
derful scene, and that music so pla5'^ed con- 
jured up a picture as vivid as ever play- 
house furnished to an enthralled audience. 

Pamela listened in silent rapture. What 
a God-gifted creature this was, who had so 
deeply moved her by his pen, who moved 
her even more intensely by that magical 
touch upon the piano! 

When he had played those last crashing 
chords which consigned the profligate to his 
doom, he waited for a minute or so, and 
then, softly, as if almost unawares, in mere 
absent-minded idleness, his hands wandered 
into the staccato accompaniment of the ser- 
enade, and with the finest tenor Mildred had 
heard since she heard Sims Reeves, he sang 


61 


THE FATAL THREE. 


those delicate and dainty phrases with which 
the seducer Tvooes his last divinity. 

9 He rose from the piano at the close of that 
1 lovely air, smiling at his hearers. 

‘ ‘ I had no idea that you were a singer as 
well as a pianist,” said Mildred. 

“You forget that music is my native 
tongue. My father taught me to play be- 
fore he taught me to read, and I knew har- 
■f mony before I knew my alphabet. I was 
brought up in the house of a man who lived 
,i only for music — to whom all stringed instru- 
; meuts were as his mother-tongue. It was by 
n a caprice that he made me play the piano, 
m which he rarely touched himself.” 

S ^ “ He must have been a great genius,” said 
Pamela, with girlish fervor. 

» “Alas! no, he just missed greatness, and 
K he just missed genius. He was a highly 
ft gifted man — various, capricious, volatile — 


and he married a woman with just enough 
money to ruin him. Had he been obliged to 
earn his bread, he might have been great. 
Who can say? Hunger is the slave-driver 
with his whip of steel, who peoples the Val- 
halla of nations. If Homer had not been a 
beggar, as well as blind, we might have had 
no ‘ Tale of Troy.’ Good-by, Mrs. Greswold 
— good-by!” shaking hands with Pamela. 
“ I may bring my hostess to-morrow?” 

“I — I — suppose so,” Mildred answered, 
feebly, wondering what her husband would 
think of such an invasion. 

Yet, if Clement Cancellor, who to Mildred’s 
mind had seemed ever the ideal Priest of 
Christ, if he could tolerate and consort with 
her, could she, Mildred Greswold, persist in 
the Pharisee’s part, and hold herself aloof 
from this neighbor, to whose good works and 
kindly disposition many voices had testified? 


CHAPTER XIIL 

SHALL SHE BE LESS THAN ANOTHER? 


I It was in all good faith that Clement Can- 
; cellor had gone to Riverdale. He had- not 
gone there for the flesh-pots of Egypt.. He 
' was a man of severely ascetic habits, who ate 
and drank as temperately as a disciple of 
that old faith of the East which is gaining a 
curious influence upon our new life of the 
West. For him the gratification of the senses, 
soft raiment, artistic furniture, thorough- 
bred horses and luxurious carriages, palm- 
houses and orchid-houses, offered no tempta- 
tion. He stayed in Mrs. Hillersdon’s house 
I because he was her friend, her friend upon 
the broadest and soundest basis on which 
friendship could be built. He knew all that 
was to be known about her. He knew her 
frailties of the past, her virtues in the pres- 
ent, her exalted hope in the future. From 
her own lips he had heard the story of Louise 
Lorraine’s life. She had extenuated noth- 
ing. She had not withheld from him either 
I, the magnitude of her sins or their number — 
nay, it may be that she had in somewise exag- 
1^ gerated the blackness of those devils whom 
he, Clement Cancellor, had cast out from 
her, enhancing by just so much the magni- 


tude of the work he had wrought. She had 
held back nothing; but over every revelation 
she had contrived to spread that gloss which 
a clever woman knows how to give to the 
tale of her own wrong-doing. In every inci- 
dent of that evil career she had contrived to 
show herself more sinned against than sin- 
ning; the fragile victim of overmastering 
wickedness in others ; the martyr of man’s 
treachery and man’s passion ; the sport of fate 
and circumstance. Had Mr. Cancellor known 
the world he lived in half as well as he knew 
the world beyond, he would hardly have be- 
lieved so readily in the lady who had been 
Louise Lorraine ; but he was too single- 
minded to doubt a repentant sinner whose 
conversion from the ways of evil had been 
made manifest by so many good works, and 
such unflagging zeal in the exercises of the 
Anglican Church. 

Parchment Street, Grosvenor Square, is 
one of the fashionable streets of London, and 
St. Elizabeth’s, Parchment Street, had grad- 
ually developed, in Clement Cancellor’s in- 
cumbency, into one of the most popular tem- 
ples at the West End of London. He whose 


62 


THE FATAL THREE. 


life-desire had been to carry the lamp of the 1 
faith into dark places, to be the friend and 
teacher of the friendless and the untaught, 
found himself almost in spite of himself a 
fashionable preacher, and the delight of the 
highly cultured, the wealthy, and the aristo- 
cratic. In his parish of St. Elizabeth’s there 
was plenty of work for him to do — plenty of 
that work which he had chosen as the mis- 
sion that had been given to him to fulfil. Be- 
hind those patrician streets where only the 
best-appointed carriages drew up, where only 
the best-dressed footmen ever pulled the bells 
or rattled long peals upon high-art knockers, 
there were some of the worst slums in Lon- 
don, and it was in those slums that half Mr. 
Canceller’s life was spent. In narrow alleys 
between Oxford and Wigmore streets, in the 
intricate purlieus of Marylebone Lane the An- 
glican priest had ample scope for his labor, 
a field offering free play to the husbandman. 
And in the labyrinth hidden in the heart of 
West End, London, Mr. Cancellor’s chief co- 
adjutor for the last twenty years had been 
Louise Ilillersdon. Thoroughness was the 
supreme quality of Mrs. Ilillersdon’s mind. 
Nothing stopped her. It was this temper 
which had given her distinction in the days 
when princes were her cup-bearers and dia- 
monds her daily tribute. There had been 
other women as beautiful, other women as 
fascinating; but there was not one who with 
beauty and fascination combined the reck- 
less audacity and the indomitable resolution 
of Louise Lorraine. When Louise Lorraine 
took possession of a man’s wits and a man’s 
fortune, that man was doomed. He was as 
completely gone as the lemon in the iron 
squeezer. A twist of the machine, and there 
is nothing left but broken rind and crushed 
pulp. A season of infatuation, and there 
was nothing left of Miss Lorraine’s admirer 
but shattered health and an overdrawn bank- 
ing account. Estates, houses, friends, posi- 
tion, good name, all had vanished from the 
man whom Louise Lorraine ground in her 
mortar. She spoke of him next season with 
half-contemptuous pity. “Did I know Sir 
John Barrymore? Yes; he used to come to 
my parties sometimes. A nice fellow enough, 
but such a terrible fool!’’ 

When Louise Lorraine married Tom Hill- 
ersdou, and took it into her head to break 
away altogether from her past career to pose 


before the world as a beautiful Magdalen, 
she was clever enough to know that to achieve 
any place in society she must have a very 
powerful influence to help her. She was 
clever enough to discover that the one influ- 
ence which a woman in her position could 
count upon was the influence of the Church. 
She was beautiful enough and refined enough 
to win friends among the clergy by the charm 
of her personality. She was rich enough to 
secure such friends, and bind them to herself 
by the splendor of her gifts, by her substan- 
tial aid in those good works which are to the 
priest as the very breath of his life. One 
man she could win by an organ ; another 
lived only to complete a steeple ; the third 
had been yearning for a decade for that gold- 
en hour when the cracked tintinabulation 
which now summoned his flock should be 
exchanged for the music of a fine peal of 
bells. Such men as these were only too easi- 
ly won, and the drawing-rooms of the great 
house in Park Lane were rarely without the 
grace of some priestly figure in long frock- 
coat and Roman collar. 

Clement Cancellor was of a sterner stuff, 
and not to be bought by bell or reredos, rood- 
screen or pulpit. Him Louise Ilillersdon won 
by larger measures; to him she offered all 
that was spiritual and aspiring in her nature, 
and this woman of strange memories was not 
without spiritual aspirations and real striv- 
ing after godliness. Clement Cancellor was 
no pious simpleton, to be won by studied 
hypocrisies and crocodile tears. He knew 
truth from falsehood, had never in his life 
been duped by the jingle of false coin. He 
knew that Mrs. Hillersdon’s repentance had 
the true ring, albeit she was in some things 
still of the earth, earthy. She had worked 
for him and with him in that wilderness of 
London as not one other Avoman in his con- 
gregation had ever Avorked. To the lost of 
her oAvn sex she had been as a redeeming 
angel. Wretched women had blessed her 
with their expiring breath, had died full of 
hopes that might never have been kindled 
had not Louise Lorraine sat beside their beds. 
Few other women had ever so influenced the 
erring of her sex. She who had waded deep 
in the slough of sin kneAv how to talk to 
these sinners. 

Mr. Cancellor never forgot her as he had 
seen her by the bed of death and in the haunts 


THE FATAL THREE. 


63 


of iniquity. She could never be to him as 
the herd of women. To the mind of the 
preacher she had a higher value than one in 
twenty of those women of his flock whose 
unstained lives had never needed the cleans- 
ing of self-sacrifice and difficult works. 

Thus it was that the Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s 
had never shrunk from acknowledging Mrs. 
Hillersdon as his personal friend, had never 
feared to sit at her board, or to be seen with 
her in public; and in the work of Louise Lor- 
raine’s rehabilitation Mr. Cancellor was a 
tower of strength. And now this latest mark 
of friendship, this visit to her country home, 
and this appearance in the noble old Abbey 
Church at her solicitation, filled her cup of 
pride. These starched county people who 
liad shunned her hospitalities were to see 
that one of the most distinguished preachers 
in the High Church party had given her his 
friendship and his esteem. 

It had been something for her to have had 
the Prince at Riverdale; it was still more to 
her to have Clement Cancellor. 

Pamela was in a flutter of excitement all 
Saturday morning, in the expectation of Cas- 
te! lani’s reappearance in the afternoon. She 
had heard Mr. Cancellor preach, and was de- 
lighted at the idea of seeing him in the pleas- 
ant intimacy of afternoon tea. Had there 
been no such person as Castellani, her spirits 
would have been on tiptoe at the idea of con- 
versing with the fashionable preacher — of tell- 
ing him in hushed and reverent tones of all 
those deep emotions his eloquence had in- 
spired in her. But the author of ‘ ‘ Nepenthe ” 
possessed just that combination of gifts and 
qualities which commands the admiration of 
such a girl as Pamela. That exquisite touch 
on the piano, that perfect tenor voice, that 
semi-exotic elegance of dress and figure, all 
had made their mark upon the sensitive-plate 
of a girl’s ardent fancy. “If I had pictured 
to myself the man who wrote ‘Nepenthe,’ I 
should have imagined just such a face, just 
such a style,” thought Pamela, quite forget- 
ting that when first she had read the book 
she had made a very vivid picture of the au- 
thor altogether the opposite of Cesare Castel- 
lani— a dark man, lean as a whipping-post, 
grave as philosophy itself, with sombre black 
eyes, and ebon hair, and a complexion of an- 
tique marble. And now she was ready to 


accept the Italian, sleek, supple, essentially 
modern in every grace and attribute, in place 
of that sage of antique mould. 

She went dancing about with the dogs all 
the morning, inciting the grave Kassandra to 
unwonted exertions, running in and out of 
the drawing-room, making an atmosphere of 
life and gayety in the grave old house. Mil- 
dred’s heart ached as she watched that flying 
figure in the white gown, youth, health, joy- 
ousness personified. 

“Oh, if my darling were but here, life 
might be full of happiness again,” she 
thought. ‘ ‘ I should cease to weary myself 
with wondering about that hidden past.” 

Do what she would, her thoughts still dwelt 
upon the image of that wife who had pos- 
sessed George Greswold’s heart before her. 
She knew that he must have loved that other 
woman whom he had sworn before God’s al- 
tar to cherish. He was not the kind of man 
to marry for any motive but a disinterested 
love. That he had loved passionately, and 
that he had been wronged deeply, was Mil- 
dred’s reading of the mystery. There had 
been a look of agony in his countenance 
when he spoke of the past that told of a sor- 
row too deep for words. 

“ He has never loved me as he once loved 
her,” thought Mildred, who out of the wealth 
of her own love had developed the capacity 
for that self-torture called jealousy. 

It seemed to her that her husband had 
taken pains to avoid the old opportunities of 
confidential talk since that revelation of last 
Sunday. He had been more than usually en- 
gaged by the business details of his estate; 
and she fancied that he made the most of all 
those duties which he used once to perform 
with the utmost despatch, grudging every 
hour that was spent away from the home 
circle. He now complained of the new stew- 
ard’s ignorance, which threw so much extra 
work upon himself. 

“After jogging on for years in the same 
groove with a man who knew every inch of 
the estate and every tenant, I find it hard 
work teaching a new man,” he told his wife. 

This sounded reasonable enough, yet she 
could but think that since Sunday he had 
taken pains to avoid being alone with her. 
If he asked her to drive or walk with him, 
he secured Pamela’s company before the ex- 
cursion was planned. 


64 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“We must show you the country,” he 
said. 

Mildred told him of the threatened incur- 
sion from Riverdale as they sat at luncheon 
with Pamela. 

“ I hope you don’t mind my receiving Mrs. 
Hillersdon?” she said. 

“No, my dear, I think it would take a 
much worse woman than Mrs. Hillersdon to 
do you any harm, or Pamela either, I hope. 
Whatever her early history may have been, 
she has made Tom Hillersdon an excellent 
wife, and she has been a very good friend to 
the poor. I should not have cared for you 
to cultivate Mrs. Hillersdon, or the society 
she brings round her, at Riverdale — ” 

“ Sir Henry says they have people from 
the music halls,” interjected Pamela, in an 
awe-stricken voice. 

“But if Mrs. Hillersdon likes to come here 
with her clerical star — ” 

“Don’t call him a star, George. He is 
highly gifted, and people have chosen to 
make him the fashion, but he is the most 
single-hearted and simple-minded man I ever 
met. No popularity could spoil him. I feel 
that if he holds out the hand of friendship to 
Mrs. Hillersdon, she must be a good woman.” 

“Let her come, Mildred, only don’t let her 
coming open the door to intimacy. I would 
not have my wife the friend of any woman 
with a history.” 

“And yet there are histories in most lives, 
George, and there is sometimes a mystery.” 

She could not refrain from this little touch 
of bitterness, yet she was sorry the instant 
she had spoken, deeply sorry, when she saw 
the look of pain in the darkly thoughtful face 
opposite to her. Why should she wilfully 
wound him, purposelessly, needlessly; she 
who so fondly loved him, whose keenest pain 
was to think that he had loved any woman 
upon earth before he loved her? 

“You will be at home to help me to re- 
ceive my old friend, George,” she said, as 
they rose from the table. 

“Yes, I will be at home to welcome Can- 
cellor, and to guard you from his protegee’s 
influence if I can.” 

They were all three in the drawing-room 
when the Riverdale party arrived. Mildred 
and Mrs. Hillersdon met in somewise as old 
acquaintances, having been thrown together 
on numerous occasions, at hunt balls, charity 


bazaars, and other j)ublic assemblies. Pamela 
was the only stranger. 

Although the romance and the scandal of 
Louise Lorraine’s career was called ancient 
history, she was still a beautiful woman. 
The delicate features, the pure tones of the 
alabaster skin, and the large Irish gray eyes 
had been kindly dealt with by time. On the 
verge of fifty, Mrs. Hillersdon might have 
owned only to forty, bad she cared so far to 
palter with truth. Her charm was, however, 
now more in a fascinating personality than in 
the remains of a once dazzling loveliness. 
There was mind in the keen, bright face, 
with its sharply cut lines, and those traces of 
intellectual wear which give a new grace, 
in.stead of the old one of soft and youthful 
roundness and faultless coloring. The bloom 
was gone from the peach, the brilliancy of 
youth had faded from those speaking eyes, 
but there was all the old sweetness of expres- 
sion which had made Louise Lorraine’s smile 
irresistible as the song of the lurlei in the 
days that were gone. Her dress was perfect, 
as it had always been from the days when 
she threw aWay her last cotton stocking, 
darned by her own fair hands, and took to 
dressing like a princess of the blood royal, 
and with perhaps even less concern for cost. 
She dressed in perfect harmony with her age 
and position. Her gown was of softest black 
silk, draped with some semi-diaphanous fab- 
ric and clouded with Chantilly lace. Her 
bonnet was of the same lace and gauze, and 
her long, thin hand was fitted to perfection 
in a black glove which met a cloud of lace 
just below the elbow. 

At a period when almost every woman 
who wore black glittered with beads and 
bangles from head to foot, Mrs. Hillersdon’s 
costume was unembellished by a single orna- 
ment. The Parisian milliner had known how 
to obey her orders to the letter when she stip- 
ulated, without point de jais — and the effect 
was at once distinguished and refined. 

Clement Canceller greeted his old pupil 
with warm friendliness, and meekly accepted 
her reproaches for all those invitations which 
he had refused in the past ten years. 

“You told me so often that it was impos- 
sible, and yet you can go to my neighbor,” 

I she said. 

I “ My dear Mildred, I went to Riverdale be- 
I cause I was wanted at Romsey.” 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“And do you think you were not wanted 
at Romsey before to-day— do you think we 
should not have been proud to have you 
preach in our church here? People would 
have flocked from far and wide to hear you 
— yes, even to Enderby Church— and you 
might have aided some good work, as you 
are going to do to-morrow. How clever of 
Mrs. Hillersdon to know how to tempt you 
down here!” 

“You may be sure it is not the first time I 
have tried, Mrs. Greswold,” said the lady, 
with her fascinating smile. “Your influ- 
ence would have gone farther than mine 
had you taken as much trouble as I have 
done.” 

Mr. Rollinson, the Curate of Enderby, was 
announced at this moment. The vicar was 
a rich man with another parish in his cure, 
and his own comfortable vicarage and his 
brother’s family mansion being adjacent to 
the other church, Enderby saw him but sel- 
dom, and Mr. Rollinson was a person of 
much more weight in the parish than the 
average clerical subaltern. Mildred liked 
him for his plain-sailing Christianity and 
unfailing kindness to the poor, and she had 
asked him to tea this afternoon, knowing that 
he would like to meet Clement Cancellor. 

Castellani looked curiously unlike those 
three other men, with their grave counte- 
nances and unstudied dress; George Gres- 
wold roughly clad in shooting-jacket and 
•knickerbockers; the two priests in well-worn 
black. The Italian made a spot of bright- 
ness in that sombre assembly, the sunlight 
touching his hair and mustache with glints 
of gold, his brown velvet coat and light gray 
trousers suggestive of the studio rather than 
of rustic lanes, a gardenia in his button-hole, 
a valuable old intaglio for his scarf-pin, and 
withal a half-insolent look of amusement at 
those two priests and the sombre-visaged 
master of the house. He slipped with ser- 
pentine grace to the farther side of the piano, 
where he contrived his first Ute-d-tete with 
Pamela, comfortably sheltered by the great 
Henri II. vase of gloxinias on the instru- 
ment. 

Pamela was shy at first, and would hardly 
speak; then taking courage, told him how she 
had wondered and wept over “ Nepenthe,” 
and they talked as if they were two kindred 
souls that had been kept too long apart by 


65 

adverse fate, and thrilled with the new de- 
light of union. 

Round the tea-table the conversation was 
of a graver cast. After a general discussion 
of the threatening clouds upon the political 
and ecclesiastical horizon the talk had drifted 
to a question which at this time was very 
much in the minds of men. The Deceased 
Wife’s Sisters bill had been thrown out by 
the Upper House during the last session, and 
everybody had been talking of that debate in 
which three princes of the blood royal had 
been attentive auditors. They had recorded 
their vote on the side of liberty of conscience, 
but in vain. Time-honored prejudices had 
prevailed against modern enlightenment. 

Clement Cancellor was a man who would 
have suffered martyrdom for his faith ; he 
was generous, he was merciful, gentle, self- 
sacrificing, pure in spirit ; but he was not lib- 
eral-minded, The old shackles hung heavily 
upon him. He could not forgive Wycliffe, 
and he could not love Latimer. He was an 
ecclesiastic after the antique pattern. To 
him the marriage of a priest was a base pal- 
tering with the lusts of the flesh; and to him 
a layman’s marriage with a dead wife’s sister 
was unholy and abominable. He had been 
moved to indignation by the words that had 
been spoken and the pamphlets that had been 
written of late upon this question, and now, 
carried away by George Greswold’s denun- 
ciation of that prejudiced majority by which 
the bill had been rejected, Mr. Cancellor gave 
his indignation full vent, and forgot that ho 
was speaking in a lady’s drawing-room, and 
before feminine hearers. 

He spoke of such marriages as unholy and 
immoral, he spoke of such households as ac- 
cursed. Mildred listened to him, and watched 
him wonderingly, scared at this revelation of 
an unknown side of his character. To her 
he had ever been the gentlest of teachers; 
she saw him now pallid with wrath — she 
heard him breathing words of fire. 

George Greswold took up the glove, not 
because he had ever felt any particular in- 
terest in this abstract question of canonical 
law, but because he hated narrow-minded 
opinions and clerical prejudices. 

“Why should the sister of his wife be dif- 
ferent to a man from all other women? You 
may call her different — you may set her apart 
— you may say she must be to him as his own 


66 


THE FATAL THREE. 


sister — her beauty must not touch him, the 
charms that fascinate other men must have 
no influence over him. You may lay this 
down as a law — civil — canonical — what you 
will — but the common law of nature will 
override your clerical code, will burst your 
shackles of prejudice and tradition. Shall 
Rachael be withheld from him who was true 
and loyal to Leah? She has dwelt in his 
house as his friend, the favorite and play- 
mate of his children. He has respected her 
as he would have respected any other of his 
wife’s girl-friends; but he has seen that she 
was fair; and if God takes the wife, and he, 
remembering the sweetness of that old friend- 
ship, and his children’s love, turns to her as 
the one woman who can give him back his 
lost happiness, rekindle the sacred fire of the 
domestic hearth — is he to be told that this 
one woman can never be his, because she 
was the sister of his first chosen? She has 
come out of the same stock whose loyalty he 
has proved, she would bring to his hearth all 
the old sweet associations — ” 

“And she would not bring him a second 
mother-in-law. What a stupendous superi- 
ority she would have there!" interjected the 
jovial Rollinson, who had been wallowing in 
hot-buttered cakes and strong tea, until his 
usually roseate visage had become startlingly 
rubicund. 

He was in all things the opposite of the 
Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s. He wrote poetry, 
made puns, played billiards, dined out at all 
the houses in the neighborhood that were 
worth dining at, and was only w’aiting to 
marry until Tom Hillersdon should be able 
to give him a living. 

Mr. Cancellor reproved the ribald jester 
with a scathing look, before he took up the 
argument against his host. 

“If this bill were to pass, no virtuous wom- 
an could live in the house of a married sis- 
ter,” he said. 

“ That is as much as to say that no honest 
woman can live in the house of any married 
man,” retorted Greswold, hotly. “Do you 
think if a man is weak enough to fall in love 
with another woman under his wife’s roof 
he is less likely to succumb to her fascina- 
tions because your canonical law stares him 
in the face telling him, ‘Thou canst never 
wed her.’ The married man who is false to 
his wife is not influenced by the chances of 


the future. He is either a bold, bad man 
whose only thought is to win the woman 
whom he loves at any cost of honor or con- 
science, or he is a weak fool who drifts hope- 
lessly to destruction, and in whom the reso- 
j lution of to-day yields to the temptation of 
to-morrow. Neither type is influenced one 
jot by the consideration whether he can or 
cannot marry the woman he loves under the 
I unlikely circumstance of his wife’s untimely 
death. The man who does so calculate is 
the one man in so many thousands of men 
who, as statistics may show, will poison his 
wife to clear the way for his new fancy. I 
don’t think we ought to legislate for poison- 
ers. In plain words, if a married man is 
weak enough or wicked enough to be seduced 
from his allegiance by the charms of any 
woman that dwells beneath his roof, he will 
i not be the less likely to fall because the law 
i of the land has made that woman anathema 
I maranatha, or because he has been warned 
from the pulpit that she is to be to him as 
} his own flesh and blood, no dearer and no 
! less dear than the sister whose rosy lips 
I cleaved to his when he was in his cradle, be- 
side whom he grew from infancy to man- 
hood, and whom he has loved all his life, 
hardly knowing whether she is as lovely as 
Hebe or as ugly as Tisiphoue.” 

“ You are a disciple of the New Learning, 
Mr. Greswold, ’’Cancellor said, bitterly ; “the 
learning which breaks down all barriers and 
annihilates the Creator of all things — the 
learning which has degraded God from in- 
finite power to infinitesimal insignificance, 
and which explains the genius of Plato and 
j Shakespeare, Luther and Newton, as the ul- 
timate outcome of an unconscious primeval 
mist.” 

“I am no Darwinian,” replied Greswold, 
coldly, ‘ but I would rather belong to his 
school of speculative inquiry than to the 
Calvinism which slew Servetus or the Roman 
Catholicism which kindled the death-pile of 
the Oxford martyrs.” 

Mildred was not more anxious than Mrs. 
Hillersdon to end a discussion which threat- 
ened angry feeling. They looked at each 
other in an agony, and then with a sudden 
inspiration Mildred exclaimed, 

“ If we could only persuade Mr. Castellani 
to play to us. We are growing so terribly 
serious,” and then she went to Clement Can- 


THE FATAL THREE. 


67 


cellor, who was standing by the open win- 
dow, and took her place beside him, while 
Mrs. Hillersdon talked with Pamela and Cas- 
tellani at the piano. “You know what a 
privilege it is to me always to hear you talk,” 
she murmured, in her sweet, subdued voice. 

“ You know how I have followed your teach- 
ing in all things. And be assured my bus- i 
band is no materialist. We both cling to ^ 
the old faith, the old hopes, the old promises. | 
You must not misjudge him because of a ■ 
single difference of opinion.” 

“Forgive me, my dear, Mildred,” replied 
Cancellor, touched by her submission. “Ij 
did wrong to be angry. I know that to | 
many good Christians this question of mar- 
riage with a sister - in - law is a stumbling- 
block. I have taken the subject too deeply 
to heart perhaps — I, to whom marriage alto- 
gether seems outside the Christian priest’s 
horizon. Perhaps I may exaggerate the peril 
of a wider liberty; but I, who look upon 
Henry VIII. as the arch-enemy of the one 
vital Church — of which he might have been 
the wise and enlightened reformer — I, who 
trace to his unhallowed union with his 
brother’s widow all the after -evils of his 
career — must needs lift up my voice against 
a threatened danger.” 

A crash of mighty chords began Mendels- 
sohn’s “Wedding March,” and sounded like 
a touch of irony. Do what the preacher 
might to assimilate earth to heaven, here 
there would still be marrying and giving in 
marriage. 

After the march Mildred went over to the 
piano and asked Castellani to sing. 

He bowed a silent assent, and played the 
brief symphony to a ballad of Heine’s set 
by Jensen. The exquisite tenor voice, the 
perfect taste of the singer, held every one 
spellbound. They listened in silence, and 
entreated him to sing again, and then again, 
till he had sung four of these jewel-like bal- 
lads, and they felt that it was impertinence 
to ask for more. 

Mildred had stolen round to her own shel- 
tered corner, half hidden by a group of tall 
palms. She sat with her hands clasped in 
her lap, her head bent. She could not see 
the singer. She only heard the low, pathetic 
voice, slightly veiled. It touched her like 
no other voice that she had ever heard .since 
in her girlhood she burst into a passion of 


sobs at the opening phrase of Sims Reeves’s 
“Come into the garden, Maude,” just those 
seven notes, touching some hypersensitive 
chord in her own organization, and moving 
her almost to hysteria. And now in this 
voice of the man who of all other men she in- 
stinctively disliked, the same tones touched 
the same chord, and loosened the flood-gates 
of her tears. She sat with streaming eyes, 
grateful for the sheltering foliage which 
screened her from observation. 

She dried her eyes and recovered herself 
with difficulty when the singer rose from the 
piano and Mrs. Hillersdon began to take leave. 
Rollinson, the curate, button-holed Castellani 
on the instant. 

“You sing as if you had just come from 
the seraphic choir,” he said. “You must 
sing for us next Friday week.” 

“ Who are ‘us?’ ” asked Castellani. 

“ Our concert in aid of the fund for put- 
ting a Burne-Jones window over the altar.” 

“A concert in Enderby village? Is it to 
be given at the lock-up or in the pound?” 

“ It is to be given in this room. Mrs. Gres- 
wold has been good enough to allow us the 
use of her drawing-room and her piano. 
Miss Ransome promises to preside at the 
buffet for tea and coffee.” 

“It will be glorious fun,” exclaimed Pa- 
mela. “ I shall feel like a barmaid. I have 
always envied barmaids.” 

“ Daudet says there is one effulgent spot 
in every man’s life— one supreme moment 
when he stands on the mountain-top of fort- 
une and of bliss, and from which all the rest 
of his existence is a gradual descent. I won- 
der whether that afternoon will be your 
effulgent spot. Miss Ransome?” said Mrs. 
Hillersdon, laughingly. 

“It will— it must. To superintend twm 
great urns of tea and coffee — almost as nice 
as those delicious beer -engines one sees at 
Salisbury Station — to charge people a shil- 
ling for a small cup of tea, and sixpence for 
a penny sponge-cake. What splendid fun!” 

“Will you help us, Mr. Castleton?” asked 
the curate, who was not good at names. 

“ Mrs. Greswold has only to command me. 
I am in all things her slave.” 

“Then she will command you — she does 
command you,” cried the curate. 

“If you will be so very kind—” began 
Mildred. 


68 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“I am only too proud to obey you,” an- 
swered Castellani, with more earnestness than 
the occasion required, drawing a little nearer 
to Mildred as he spoke; “only too glad of 
an excuse to return to this house.” 

Mildred looked at him with a half-fright- 
ened expression, and then glanced at Pamela. 
Did he mean mischief of some kind? Was 
this the beginning of an insidious pursuit of 
that frank, open-hearted girl, who was an 
heiress of quite sufficient mark to tempt the 
casual adventurer? 

“Of all men I have eve^seen he is the 
last to whom I would intrust a girl’s fate,” 
thought Mildred, determined to be very much 
on her guard againt the blandishments of 
Cesare Castellani. 

She took the very worst means to ward off 
danger. She made the direful mistake of 
warning the girl against the possible pursuer. 

“He is a man I could never trust,” she 
said. 

“ No more could I,” replied Pamela; “but 
oh, how exquisitely he sings!” and excited at 
the mere memory of that singing, she ran to 
the piano and began to pick out the melody 
of Heine’s “ Ich weiss nicht was soli es bedeu- 
ten,” and sang the words softly in her girlish 
voice, and then slipped away h’om the piano 
with a nervous little laugh. 

“ Upon my word, Aunt Mildred, I am trau- 
rig myself at the very thought of that ex- 
quisite song,” she said. “ What a gift it is 


to be able to sing like that! How I wish 1 
were Cesare Castellani!” 

“What, when we have both agreed that 
he is not a good man?” 

“Who cares about being goodV' exclaimed 
Pamela, beside herself; “three - fourths of 
this world are good. But to be able to write 
a book that can unsettle every one’s religion; 
to be able to make everybody miserable when 
one sings — those are gifts that place a man 
on a level with the Greek gods! If I were 
Mr. Castellani I should feel like Mercury or 
Apollo.” 

“Pamela, you frighten me when you rave 
like that. Remember that for all we know 
to the contrary this man may be a mere ad- 
venturer, and in every way dangerous.” 

“Why should we think him an advent- 
urer? He told me all about himself. He 
told me that his grandfather was under ob- 
ligations to your grandfather. He told me 
about his father, the composer, who wrote 
operas which are known all over Italy, and 
who died young, like Mozart and Mendels- 
sohn. Genius is hereditary ^with him; he 
was suckled upon art. I ha,ve no doubt he 
is bad, irretrievably bad,” said Pamela, with 
unction; “but don’t try to persuade me that 
he is a vulgar adventurer who would try to 
borrow five-pound notes, or a fortune-hunter 
who would try to marry one for one’s mon- 
ey,” concluded the girl, falling back upon 
her favorite form of speech. 


CHAPTER XIV. 

LIFTING THE CURTAIN. 


The charity concert afforded Cesare Cas- 
tellani just the necessary excuse for going to 
Enderby Manor-house as often as he liked, 
and for staying there as long as he liked. 
He was now on a familiar footing. He drowe 
or rode over from Riverdale nearly every day 
in the three weeks that intervened between 
Mr. Canceller’s sermon and the afternoon 
concert. He made himself the curate’s right 
hand in all the details of the entertainment. 
He chose the music, he wrote the programme, 
he sent it to his favorite printer to be printed 
in antique type upon ribbed paper, a perfect 


gem in the way of a programme. He scoured 
the country round in quest of amateur talent, 
and was much more successful than the cu- 
rate had been in the same kind of quest. 

“I’m astounded at your persuading Lady 
Millborough to show in the daylight,” said 
Mr. Rollinson, laughing. “You must have 
exercised the tongue of the serpent to over- 
come her objection to the glare of the after- 
noon sun.” 

‘ ‘Estote prudentes sicuti serpentes, ” said Cas- 
tellani. “There’s a fine old ecclesiastic’s 
motto for you. I know Lady Millborough 


THE FATAL THREE. 


69 


rather dreads the effect of sunlight upon her 
Nacre Bernhardt. She told me that she was 
never equal to singing in the afternoon; the 
glare of the sun always gave her a headache. 
But I assured her, in tlie first place, that there 
should be no sun glare — that as an artist I 
abhorred a crude, white light — and that it 
should be my business to see that our con- 
cert-room was lighted upon purely artistic 
principles. We w^ould have the dim relig- 
ious light which painters and poets love ; and, 
in the second place, I assured her that she 
had as fine a contralto as Madame Alboni, 
on whose knees I had often sat as a child, 
and who gave me the emerald pin I was 
wearing.” 

“My hat, what a man you are!” exclaimed 
Rollinson. “But do you mean to say we are 
to give our concert in the dark?” 

“We will not have the afternoon sunshine 
blinding half our audience. We will have 
the auditorium in a cool twilight, and we will 
have lamplight on our platform — just that 
mellow and flattering light in which elderly 
women look young and young women an- 
gelic.” 

“ We’ll leave everything to you,” cried the 
curate. “ I think we ought to leave him free 
scope; ought we not, Mrs. Greswold?” 

Mildred assented. Pamela was enthusias- 
tic. This concert was to be one of the events 
of her life. Castellani had discovered that 
she possessed a charming mezzo-soprano. 
She was to sing a duet with him. Oh, what 
rapture!— a duet of his own composition, all 
about roses and love and death! 

“ ’Tvvere sweet to die ixs the roses die, 

If I had but lived for thee ; 

Yes, a life as long as the nightingale’s song 
Were enough for my heart and me.” 

The words and the voices were interwoven 
in a melodious web; tenor and soprano en- 
twined together — always beginning again 
like the phrases in an anthem. 

The preparation of this one duet alone 
obliged Mr. Castellani to be nearly every day 
at Enderby. A musician generally has inex- 
haustible patience in teaching his own mu- 
sic. Castellani hammered at every bar and 
every note with Pamela. He did not hesi- 
tate at unpleasant truths. She had received 
the most expensive instruction from a well- 
known singing-master, and according to Cas- 
tellani, everything she had been taught was 


wrong. “If you had been left alone to sing 
as the birds sing you would be ever so much 
better off,” he said; “ the man has murdered 
a very fine organ. If I had had the teaching 
of you, you would have sung as well as Tre- 
belli by this time.” 

Pamela thrilled at the thought. Oh, to 
sing like some great singer — to be able to 
soar skyward on the wings of music — to sing 
as he sang! She had known him a fortnight 
by this time, and was deeply in love with 
him. In moments of confidence by the piano 
he called her Pamela, treating her almost as 
if she were a child; yet with a touch of gal- 
lantry always— an air that said, “You are 
beautiful, dear clvild, and you know it — but 
I have lived my life.” Before Mrs. Greswold 
he was more formal, and called her Miss 
Ransome. 

All barriers were down now between Riv- 
erdale and the manor. Mrs. Hillersdon was 
going to make an extra large house-party on 
purpose to patronize the concert. It was to 
be on the 7th of September. The partridge- 
shooting would be in full swing and the 
shoote rs assembled. Mrs. Greswold had been 
to tea at Riverdale. There seemed to be no 
help for it, and George Greswold was appar- 
ently indifferent. 

“My dearest, your purity of mind will be 
in no danger from Mrs. Hillersdon ; even 
were she still Louise Lorraine, she could not 
harm you ; and you know I am not given to 
consider the qu’on dira'i' oc in such a case. 
Let her come here, by all means, so long as 
she is not obnoxious to you.” 

“She is far from that. I think she has 
the most delightful manners of any woman 
I ever met.” 

“ So, no doubt, had Circe; yet she changed 
men into swine.” 

“ Mr. Canceller would not believe in her if 
she were not a good woman.” 

“I should set a higher value on Mr. Can- 
cel lor’s opinion if he were more of a man of 
the world and less of a bigot. See what non- 
sense he talked about the Deceased Wife’s 
Sisters bill.” 

“ Nonsense! Oh,George,if you knew how 
it distressed me to hear you take the other 
side — the unchristian side!” 

“I can find no word of Christ’s against 
such marriages, and the Church of old was 
always ready with a dispensation for any 


70 


THE FATAL THREE. 


such union, if it was made \vorth the Church’s 
while to be indulgent. You are Cancellor’s 
pupil, Mildred, and I cannot wonder if he 
has made you something of a bigot.” 

“ He is the noblest and most unselfish of 
men.” 

“I admit his unselfishness — the purity of 
his intentions — the tenderness of his heart — 
but I deny his nobility. Ecclesiastic nar- 
row-mindedness spoils a character that might 
have been perfect had it been less bound and 
hampered by tradition. Cancellor is a couple 
of centuries behind the time. His Church is 
the Church of Laud.” 

“I thought you admired and loved him, 
George,” said Mildred, regretfully. 

“I admire his good qualities; I love him 
for his thoroughness; but our creeds are wide 
apart. I cannot even pretend to think as he 
thinks.” 

This confession increased Mildred’s sad- 
ness. She would have had her husband 
think as she thought, believe as she believed, 
in all spiritual things. The beloved child 
they had lost was waiting for them in heav- 
en; and she would fain that they should both 
tread the same path to that better world 
where there would be no more tears, no more 
death— where day and ni^ht would be alike 
in the light of the Great Throne. She shud- 
dered at the thought of any difference of 
creed on her husband’s part, shuddered at 
that beginning of divergence which might 
end in infidelity. She had been educated by 
Clement Cancellor, and she thought as he 
thought. It seemed to her that she w^as sur- 
rounded by an atmosphere of doubt. In the 
books she read, among the more cultivated 
people whom she met, she found the same 
tendency to speculative infidelit}^ pessimism, 
Darwinism, sociology, pantheism, anything 
but Christian belief. The nearest approach 
to religious feeling seemed to be found in 
the theosophists, with their last fashionable 
Oriental improvements upon the teaching of 
Christ. 

Clement Cancellor had trained her in the 
belief that there was one church, one creed, 
one sovereign rule of life, outside of which 
determinate boundary line lay the dominion 
of Satan. And now, seeing her husband’s 
variance with her pastor upon this minor 
point of the marriage law, she began to ask 
herself whether those two might not stand 


as widely apart upon graver questions— 
whether George Greswold might not be one 
of those half-hearted Christians who attend 
their parish church and keep Sunday sacred 
because it is well to set a good example to 
their neighbors and dependents, while their 
own faith is a vanishing quantity, a memory 
of youthful beliefs, the fading reflection of a 
sun that has sunk below the horizon. 

She had discovered her husband capable 
of a suppression of truth that was almost as 
bad as falsehood, and now, having begun to 
doubt his conscientiousness, it was not un- 
natural that she should begin to doubt his 
religious feeling. 

“Had he been as deeply religious as I 
thought him he would not have so deceived 
me,” she told herself, still brooding upon 
that mystery of his first marriage. 

Castellani’s presence in the house was a 
continual source of irritation to her. It tort- 
ured her to think that he knew more of her 
husband’s past life than was known to her- 
self. She longed to question him, yet re- 
frained, feeling that there would be un- 
speakable meanness, treachery against her 
husband even, in obtaining any information 
on that past life except from his own lips. 
He had chosen to keep silence, he who could 
so easily have explained all things ; and it 
was her duty to submit. 

She tried to be interested in the concert, 
which involved a good deal of work for her- 
self, as she w'as to play all the accompani- 
ments, the piano part in a concertante duet 
by De Beriot with an amateur violin play- 
er, and a polacca by a modern classic by 
way of overture. There were rehearsals 
nearly every day, with much talk and tea- 
drinking. Enderby seemed given over to 
bustle and ga3^ety — that grave old house 
which to her mind ought to have beer, silent 
as a sepulchre, now that Lola’s voice could 
sound there nevermore. 

“People must think I am forgetting her,” 
she said to herself with a sigh, when half a 
dozen carriages had driven away from the 
door after two hours of bustle and confusion, 
much discussion as to the choice of songs, and 
the arrangement of the programme, which 
everybody wanted different. 

“I cannot possibly sing ‘The Three Fish- 
ers’ after Mr. Scobell’s ‘Wanderer,’” pro- 
tested Lady Millborough. “It would nev- 


THE FATAL THREE. 


71 


er do to have two dismal songs in succes- 
sion.” 

Yet when it was proposed that her lady- 
ship’s song should succeed Mr. Rollinson’s 
admirable rendering of George Grossmith’s 
“ He was such a Careful Man,” she distinct- 
ly refused to sing immediately after a comic 
song. 

“I am not going to take the taste of Mr. 
Rollinson’s vulgarity out of people’s mouths,” 
she told Mildred in an audible aside. 

To these God-gifted vocalists the accom- 
panist was an inferior being, a person with 
a mere mechanical gift of playing anything 
set before her with taste and style. They 
treated her as if she had been a machine. 

“If you wouldn’t mind going over this 
duet just once more I think we should feel 
more comfortable in it,” said one of the two 
Misses Tadcaster, who were to take the roof 
off, metaphorically, in the “ Giorno d’Or- 
rore.” 

Mildred toiled with unwavering good-nat- 
ure, and suppressed her shudders at many a 
false note, and cast oil on the waters when 
the singers were inclined to quarrel. She 
was glad of the drudgery that kept her fin- 
gers and her mind occupied; she was glad of i 
any distraction that changed the current of 
her thoughts. 

It was the day before the concert. Cesare 
Castellani had established himself as I'ami de 
la maison, a person who had the right to I 
come in and out as he liked, whose coming j 
and going made no difference to the master | 
of the house. Had George Greswold’s mind ; 
been less abstracted from the business of 
every-day life he might have seen danger to ' 
Pamela Ransome’s peace of mind in the fre- j 
quent presence of the Italian, and he might 
have considered it his duty, as the young 
lady’s kinsman, to have restricted Mr. Cas- 
tellani’s privileges. But the blow which 
had crushed George Greswold’s heart a 
little more than a year ago had left him 
in somewise a broken man. He had lost 
all interest in the common joys and occu- 
pations of every-day life. His days were 
spent for the most part in long walks or 
rides in the loneliest places he could find; 
his only evening amusement was found in 
books, and those books of a kind which en- 
grossed his attention and took him out of 


himself. His wife’s companionship was al- 
ways precious to him; but their intercourse 
had lost all the old gayety and much of the old 
familiarity. There was an indefinable some- 
thing which held them asunder even when 
they were sitting in the same room, or pac- 
ing side by side, just as of old, upon the 
lawn in front of the drawing-room, or idling 
in their summer parlor in the shade of the 
cedars. 

Again and again in the last three w'eeks 
some question about the past had trembled 
upon Mildred’s lips as she sat at work by the 
piano where Castellani played in dreamy 
idleness, wandering from one master to an- 
other, or extemporizing after his own capri- 
cious fancies. Again and again she had 
struggled against the temptation and had 
conquered. No, she would not stoop to a 
meanness. She would not be disloyal to her 
husband by so much as one idle question. 

To-day Castellani was in high spirits, 
proud of to-morrow’s anticipated success, in 
which his own exertions would count for 
much. He sat at the piano in leisure hour 
after tea. All the performers had gone, 
after the final adjustment of every detail. 
Mildred sat idle, with her head resting against 
the cushion of a lugh-backed arm-chair, ex- 
hausted by the afternoon’s labors. Pamela 
stood by the piano watching and listening 
delightedly as Castellani improvised. 

“ I will give you my musical transcript of 
St. Partridge Day,” he said, smiling down 
at the notes as he played a lively melody 
with little rippling runs in the treble and 
crisp staccato chords in the bass. “ This is 
morning, and all the shooters are on tiptoe 
with delight — a misty morning,” gliding into 
a dreamy legato movement as, he spoke. 
“You can scarcely see the hills yonder, and 
the sun is not yet up. See, there he leaps 
above that eastern ridge, and all is bright- 
ness,” changing to brilliant arpeggios up and 
down the piano. ‘ ‘ Hark ! there is chanticleer. 
How shrill he peals in the morning air! The 
dogs are leaving the kennel — and now the 
gates are open, dogs and men are in the 
road. You can hear the steady tramp of the 
clumsy shooting- boots — your dreadful Eng- 
lish boots — and the merry music of the dogs. 
Pointers, setters, spaniels, smooth beasts and 
curly beasts, shaking the dew from the hedge- 
rows as they scramble along the banks, fly- 


72 


THE FATAL THREE. 


ing over the ditches — creatures of lightning 
swiftness; yes, even those fat, heavy spaniels 
which seem made to sprawl and snap at Hies 
in the sunshine or snore beside the fire.” 

He talked in brief snatches, playing all the 
time — playing with the easy brilliancy, the 
unerring grace of one to whom music is a 
native tongue — as natural a mode of thought 
expression as speech itself. 

“ I hope I don’t bore you very much,” he 
said, presently, looking up at Mildred as she 
sat white and silent, the fair face and pale 
gold hair defined against the dark sea-green 
brocade of the chair-cushion. 

He looked up at her in wondering admira- 
tion, as at a beautiful picture. How lovely 
she was, with a loveliness that grew upon 
him, and took possession of his fancy and his 
senses with a strengthening hold day by day! 
It was a melancholy loveliness, the beauty of 
a woman whose life had come to a dead 
stop, in whose breast hope and love were 
dead — or dormant. 

“Not dead,” he told himself, “only sleep- 
ing. Whose shall be the magic touch to 
awaken the sleeper? Who shall be the Or- 
pheus to bring back so sweet an Eurydice 
from the realms of death?” 

Such thoughts were in his mind as he sat 
looking at her, waiting for her answer, play- 
ing all the while, telling her how fair she was 
in the tenderest variations of an old German 
air, whose every note breathed passionate 
love. 

“Hoav sweet!” murmured Pamela; “what 
an exquisite melody!” taking some of the 
sweetness to herself. “How could such 
sweetness weary any one with the ghost of 
an ear? You are not bored by it, are you, 
aunt?” 

“Bored? no, it is delightful,” answered 
Mildred, rousing herself from a reverie. ‘ ‘ My 
thoughts went back to my childhood while 
you were playing. I never knew but one 
other person who had that gift of improvisa- 
tion, and she used to play to me when I was 
a child. She was almost a child herself, and 
of course she did not come within a long dis- 
tance of you as a pianist; but she would sit 
and play to me for an hour in the twilight, 
inventing new melodies, or playing recollec- 
tions of old melodies as she went along, de- 
, scribing in music. The old fairy tales are 
forever associated with music in my mind. 


because of those old memories. I believe 
she was highly gifted in music.” 

“Music of a high order is not an uncom- 
mon gift among >vomen of sensitive tempera- 
ment,” said Castellani, musingly. “ I take it 
to be only another name for sympathy. The 
want of musical feeling is want of sympathy. 
Shakespeare knew that when he declared the 
non-musical man to be by nature a villain. 
I could no more imagine you without tlie 
gift of music than I could imagine the stars 
without the quality of light. Mr. Greswold’s 
first wife was musical — as no doubt you 
know — indeed, highly gifted as a musician.” 

“You heard her play — and sing?” faltered 
Mildred, avoiding a direct reply. 

The sudden mention of her dead rival’s 
name had quickened the beating of her heart. 
She had longed to question him and had re- 
frained; and now without any act of hers he 
had spoken, and she was going to hear some- 
thing about that woman wdiose existence was 
a mystery to her, of whose Christian name, 
even, she was ignorant. 

“ Yes, I heard her several times at parties 
at Nice. She was much admired for her 
musical talents. She was not a grand sing- 
er, but she had been well taught, and she 
had exquisite taste, and knew exactly the 
kind of music that suited her best. She was 
one of the attractions of the Palais Montano, 
where one heard only the best music.” 

“I think you said the other day that you 
did not meet her often,” said Mildred. “ My 
husband could hardly have forgotten you 
had you met frequently.” 

“I can scarcely say that we met frequent- 
ly, and our meetings w^ere such as Mr. Gres- 
wold w^ould not be very likely to remember. 
I am not a remarkable man now; and I was 
a very insignificant person fifteen years ago. 
I was only asked to people’s houses because 
I could sing a little, and because my father 
had a reputation in the South as a composer. 
I was never introduced to your husband, but 
I was presented to his wife — as a precocious 
youth with some pretensions to a tenor voice 
—and I found her very charming, after her 
owm particular style.” 

“Was she a beautiful woman?” asked Mil- 
dred. “I— I— have never talked about her 
to my husband — she died so young— and — ” 

“ Yes, yes, I understand,” interrupted Cas- 
tellaui, as she hesitated. “Of course you 


THE FATAL THREE. 


would not speak of her. There are things 
that cannot be spoken about. There is al- 
ways the skeleton in every life — not more in 
Mr. Greswold’s past than in that of other 
people, perhaps, could we know all histories. 
I was wrong to speak of her — her name es- 
caped me unawares.” 

“Pray don’t apologize,” said Mildred, 
kindling with indignant feeling at something 
in his tone which hinted at wrong-doing on 
her husband’s part. “ There can be no rea- 
son why you should keep silence — to me ; 
though any mention of an old sorrow might 
wound him. I know my husband too well 
not to know that he must have behaved lion- 
orably in every relation of life — before I knew 
him as well as afterwards. I only asked a 
very simple question — was my predecessor 
as beautiLd as she was gifted?” 

“No. She was charming, piquant, ele- 
gant, spirituelle, but she was not handsome. 
I think she was conscious of that want of 
perfect beauty, and that it made her sensi- 
tive and even bitter. I have heard her say 
hard things of women who were handsomer 
than herself. She had a scathing tongue 
and a capricious temper, and she was not a 
favorite with her own sex, though she was 
very much admired by clever men. I know 
that as a lad I thought her one of the bright- 
est women I had ever met.” 

“It was sad that she should die so young,” 
said Mildred. 

She would not for worlds that this man 
should know the extent of her ignorance 
about the woman who had borne her hus- 
band’s name. She spoke vaguely, hoping 
that he would take it for granted she knew 
all. 

“Yes,” assented Castellani, with a sigh, 
“her death was infinitely sad.” 

He spoke as of an event of more than com- 
mon sadness — a calamity that had been in 
somewise more tragical than even untimely 
death must needs be. 

Mildred kept silence, though her heart 
ached with shapeless forebodings, though it 
would have been an unspeakable relief to 
know the worst rather than to feel the op- 
pression of this mystery. 

Castellani rose to take his leave. He was 
paler than he had been before the conversa- 
tion began, and he had a troubled air. Pa- 
mela looked at him with sympathetic dis- 


73 

tress. “I am afraid you are dreadfully 
tired,” she said, as they shook hands. 

“I am never tired— in this house,” he an- 
swered ; and Pamela appropriated the com- 
pliment by her vivid blush. 

Mildred Greswold shook hands with him 
mechanically and in silence. She was hard- 
ly conscious of his leaving the room. She 
rose and went out into the garden, while Pa- 
mela sat down to the piano and began sing- 
ing her part in the everlasting duet. She 
never sang anything else nowadays; it was a 
perpetual carol of admiration for the author 
of “Nepenthe.” 

“’Twere sweet to die as the roses die, 

If I had but lived for thee ; 

’Twere sweet to fade as the twilight fades” 
Over the w'estern sea,” 

she warbled, while Mildred paced slowly to 
and fro in front of the cedars, brooding over 
every word Castellani had spoken about her 
husband’s first wife. 

“ Her death was infinitely sad.” 

Why infinitely? The significance of the 
word troubled her. It conjured up all man- 
ner of possibilities. Why infinitely sad? All 
death is sad ; the death of the young especial- 
ly so; but to say even of untimely death that 
it was infinitely sad would seem to lift it out 
of the region of humanity’s common doom. 
That qualifying word hinted at a tragical 
fate rather than a young life cut short by 
any ordinary malady. There had been some- 
thing in Castellani’s manner which accentu- 
ated the meaning of his words. That troubled 
look, that deep sigh, that hurried departure, 
all hinted at a mystery — at a painful story — 
which he knew and did not wish to reveal. 

He had in a manner apologized for speak- 
ing of George Greswold’s first wife. There 
must have been a reason for that. He was 
not a man to say meaningless things out of 
gaucherie; not a man to stumble and equivo- 
cate from either shyness or stupidity. He 
had implied that Mr. Greswold was not like- 
ly to talk about his first marriage — that he 
would naturally avoid any allusion to his 
first wife. 

Why naturally? Why should he not speak 
of that past life? Men are not ordinarily 
reticent upon such subjects. And that a 
man should suppress the fact of a first mar- 
riage altogether, should falsely describe him- 
self in the marriage register, would suggest 


74 


THE FATAL THREE. 


memories so dark as to impel an honorable 
man to stoop to a lie rather than face the hor- 
ror of revelation. 

She walked up and down that fair stretch 
of velvet turf upon which her feet had trod- 
den so lightly in the happy years that w'ere 
gone — gone never to be recalled, as it seemed 
to her, carrying with them all that she had 
ever known of domestic peace, of wedded 
bliss. Never again could they two be as they 
had been. The mystery of the past had risen 
up between them, like some hooded phan- 
tom — a vaguely threatening figure, a hidden 
face — to hold them apart for evermore. 

“ If he had only trusted me,” she thought, 
despairingly, “there is hardly any sin that 
I would not have forgiven for love of him. 
Why could he not believe in my love well 
enough to know that I should judge him 
leniently — if there had been wrong doing on 
his side — if— if — ” 

She had puzzled over that hidden past, 
trying to penetrate the darkness, imagining 
the things that might have happened — infi- 
delity on the wife’s part — infidelity on the 
husband’s side — another and fatal attachment 
taking the place of loyal love. Sin of some 
kind there must have been, she thought, for 
such dark memories could scarcely be sin- 
less. But was husband or wife the sin- 
ner? 

“Her death was infinitely sad.” 

That sentence stood out against the dark 
background of mystery as if written in fire. 
That one fact was absolute. George Gres- 
wold’s first wife had died under circumstances 
of peculiar sadness; so painful that Castella- 
ni’s countenance grew pale and troubled at 
the very thought of her death. 

“ I cannot endure it,” Mildred cried at last, 
in an agony of doubt. “I will not endure 
this torture for another day. I will appeal 
to him. I will question him. If he values 
my love and my esteem he will answer faith- 
fully. It must be painful for him, painful 
for me, but it will be far better for us both 
in the long-run. Anything will be better than 
these torturing fears, these imaginary evils. 
I am his wife, and I have a right to know 
the truth.” 

The dressing-gong summoned her back to 
the house. Her husband was in the draw- 
, ing-room half an hour afterwards, when she 
went down to dinner. He was still in his 


jacket and knickerbockers, just as he had 
come in from a long ramble. 

“ Will you forgive me if I dine with you 
in these clothes, Mildred — and you, Pamela?” 
to the damsel in white muslin, whom he had 
just surprised at the piano, still warbling her 
honeyed strain about death and the roses; 
“I came in five minutes ago, dead beat. I 
have been in the forest, and had a tramp 
with the deer-hounds over Bramble Hill.” 

“ You walk too far, George; you are look- 
ing dreadfully tired.” 

“I’m sure 5"ou needn’t apologize for your 
dress on my account. ” said Pamela. “ Henry 
is a perfect disgrace half his time. He hates 
evening clothes, and I sometimes fear he hates 
soap and water. He can reconcile his con- 
science to any amount of dirt so long as he 
has his cold tub in the morning. He thinks 
that justifies anything. I have had to sit 
next him at dinner when he came straight 
from rats,” concluded Pamela with a shud- 
der. “But Rosalind is so foolishly indul- 
gent, she would spoil twenty husbands.” 

“And you, I suppose, would be a martinet 
to one?” said Gres wold, smiling at the girl’s 
animated face. 

“ It would depend. If I were married to 
an artist I could forgive any neglect of the 
proprieties. One does not expect a man of 
that kind to be the slave of conventionali- 
ties; but a commonplace man like Sir Henry 
Mountford has nothing to recommend him 
but his horse and tailor.” 

They went to dinner, and Pamela’s prattle 
relieved the gloom which had fallen upon 
husband and wife. George Greswold saw 
that there were signs of a new trouble in his 
wife’s face. He sat for nearly an hour alone 
with the untouched decanters before him, 
and with Kassandra’s head upon his knee. 
The dog always knew when his thoughts 
were darkest, and would not be repulsed at 
such times. She was not obtrusive, she only 
wanted to let him know there was some one 
in the world who loved him. 

It was nearly ten o’clock when he left the 
dining-room. He looked in at the drawing- 
room door, and saw his wife and his niece 
sitting at work, silent both. 

“lam going to the library to write some 
letters, Mildred,” he said; “don’t sit up for 
me.” 

She rose quickly and went over to him. 


TPIE FATAL THREE. 


75 


“Let me have half an hour’s talk with 
you first,” George, she said, in an earnest 
voice; “ I want so much to speak to you.” 

“ My dearest, I am always at your serv- 
ice,” he answered, quietly, and they went 
across the hall together to that fine old room 
w’hich was essentially the domain of the mas- 
ter of the house. 

It was a large room with three long, nar- 
row windows — unaltered from the days of 
Queen Anne — looking out to the carriage- 
drive in the front of the house. The walls 
were lined with books, in severely architect- 
ural bookcases. There was a lofty old mar- 
ble chimney-piece, richly decorated, and a 
large knee-hole desk in front of the fireplace, 
at which Mr. Greswold was wont to sit ; there 
was a shaded reading-lamp ready lighted for 
him upon this table, and there was no other 
lamp in the room. By this dim light the 
sombre coloring of oak bookcases and ma- 
roon velvet window - curtains deepened to 
black. The spacious room had almost a fu- 
nereal aspect, like that awful banqueting- 
hall to which the jocose Domitian invited his 
parasites and straightway frightened them to 
death. 

“Well, Mildred, what is the matter?” asked 
Greswold, when his wife had seated herself 
beside him in front of the massive oak desk 
at which all the business of his estate had 
been transacted since he came to Enderby. 
“There is nothing amiss, love, I hope, to 
make you so earnest?” 

“There is something very much amiss, 
George,” she answered. “Forgive me if I 
pain you by what I have to say — by the 
questions I am going to ask. I cannot help 
giving you pain, and truly and dearly as I 
love you, I cannot go on suffering as I have 
sufit'ered since that wretched Sunday after- 
noon when I discovered how you had de- 
ceived me — you whom I so trusted, so hon- 
ored as the most \ipright among men.” 

“It is a little hard that you should say I 
deceived you, Mildred. I suppressed one 
fact which had no bearing upon my relations 
with you.” 

“You must have signed your name to a 
falsehood in the register if you described 
yourself as a bachelor. ” 

“ I did not so describe myself. I confided 
the fact of my first marriage to your father 
on the eve of our wedding. I told him why 


I had been silent — told him that my past life 
had been steeped in bitterness. He w’as gen- 
erous enough to accept my confidence and to 
ask no questions. My bride was too shy, and 
too much troubled by the emotion of the hour, 
to observe what I wrote in the register, or else 
she might have noted the word ‘ widower ’ af- 
ter my name.” 

“Thank God you did not sign your name 
to a lie,” said Mildred, with a sigh of relief. 

“I am sorry my wife of fourteen years 
should think me capable of falsehood on the 
document that sealed my fate with hers.” 

“Oh, George, I know how true you are — 
how true and upright you have been in ev- 
ery word and every act of your life since we 
two have been one. It is not in my nature to 
misjudge you. I cannot think you capable of 
doing wrong to any one even under strongest 
temptation. I cannot believe that Fate could 
set such a snare for you as could entrap you 
into one dishonorable act; but I am tortured 
by the thought of a past life of which I know 
nothing, Wh}-^ did you hide your marriage 
from me Avhen we were lovers ? Why are 
you silent and secret now, when I am your 
wife, the other half of yourself, ready to 
sympathize with you, to share the burden of 
dark memories? Trust me, George, trust me. 
This secret is rising up between us like a 
stony barrier. Trust me, dear love, and let 
us be again as we have been, united in every 
thought.” 

“You do not know what you are asking 
me, Mildred,” said George Greswold, in his 
deep, grave voice, looking at her with hag- 
gard reproachful eyes. “You cannot meas- 
ure the torture you are inflicting by this sense- 
less curiosity.” 

“You cannot measure the tortures of doubt 
which I have suffered since I have known 
that you loved another woman before you 
loved me— loved her so well that you cannot 
bear even to speak of that past life which 
you lived with her — regret her so intensely 
that now, after fourteen years of wedded life 
with me, the mere memory of that lost love 
can plunge you into gloom and despair,” said 
Mildred, passionately. 

That smothered fire of jealousy which had 
been smouldering in her breast for weeks 
broke out all at once in impetiious speech. 
She no longer cared what she said. Her only 
thought was that the dead love had been 


76 


THE FATAL THREE. 


dearer and nearer tlian the living, that she 
had been cozened by a lover whose heart had 
never been wholly hers — never, even in the 
roseate dawn of her girlhood, nor in the sun- 
light of her early married life. She had been 
duped by her own affections, perhaps, from 
the very beginning. 

“I thought he must love me with the same 
measure that I loved him,” she said to her- 
self. 

“You are very cruel, Mildred,” her hus- 
band answered, quietly. “ You are probingan 
old wound, and a deep one, to the quick. You 
degrade yourself more than you degrade me 
by causeless jealousy and unworthy doubts. 
Yes, I did conceal the fact of my first mar- 
riage — not because I had loved my wife too 
well, but because I had not loved her well 
enough. I was silent about a period of my 
life which was one of unutterable misery — 
which it was my duty to myself to forget, 
if it were possible to forget — which it was a 
peril to remember. My only chance of hap- 
piness — or peace of mind — lay in total obliv- 
ion of that bitter time. It was only when I 
loved you that I began to believe forgetful- 
ness was possible to me. I courted oblivion 
by every means in my power. I told myself 
that the man who had so suffered was a man 
who had ceased to exist. George Ransome 
w'as dead. George Gres wold stood on the 
threshold of a new life, with infinite capaci- 
ties for happiness. I told myself that I might 
be a beloved and honored husband — which I 
had never been; a useful member of society 
— which I had not been hitherto. Until that 
hour all things had been against me. With 
you for my wife, all things would be in my 
favor. For thirteen happy years this promise 
of our marriage morning was fully realized; 
then came my darling’s death ; and now 
comes your estrangement.” 

“I am not estranged, George. It is only 
my dread of the beginning of estrangement 
which tortures me. Since that man spoke 
of your first wife I have brooded perpetually 
upon that hidden past. It is weak and fool- 
ish, I know, to have done so. I ought to trust 
unquestioningly ; but I cannot, George, I can- 
not. I love you too well to love without 
jealousy.” 

“Well, let the veil be lifted, then, since it 
must be so. Ask what questions you please, 
and I will answer them — as best I can.” 


“You are very good,” she faltered, draw- 
ing a little nearer to him, leaning her head 
against his shoulder as she talked to him, and, 
laying her hand on his as it lay before him 
on the desk, tightly clinched. “Tell me, 
dear, were you happy with your first wife?” 

“I was not.” 

“Not even in the beginning?” 

“ Hardly in the beginning. It was an ill- 
advised union, entered into upon impulse.” 

“ But she loved you very dearly, perhaps.” 

“She loved me— dearly — after her manner 
of loving.” 

“And you did not love her?” 

“It is a cruel thing you force me to say, 
Mildred. No, I did not love her.” 

“Had you been married long when she 
died?” 

She felt a quivering movement in the 
clinched hand on which her own lay caress- 
ingly, and she heard him draw a long and 
deep breath. 

“ About a year and a half.” 

“Her death was a sad one, I know. Did 
she go out of her mind before she died?” 

“No.” 

“Did she leave you— or do you any great 
wrong?” 

“No.” 

“Were you false to her, George? Oh, for- 
give me, forgive me — but there must have 
been something more sad than common sad- 
ness, and it might be that some new and fatal 
love — ” 

“There w'as no such thing,” he answered, 
sternly. “I was true to my marriage- vow. 
It was not a long trial — only a year and a 
half. Even a profligate might keep faith for 
so short a span.” 

“I see you will not confide in me. I will 
ask no more questions, George. That kind 
of catechism will not make us more in sym- 
pathy with each other. I will ask you noth- 
ing more — except — just one question — a 
woman’s question. Was your first wife beau- 
tiful in your eyes?” 

“ She was not beautiful, but she was intel- 
lectual, and she had an interesting counte- 
nance — a face that attracted me at first sight. 
It was even more attractive to me than the 
faces of much handsomer women. But if 
you would like to know w'hat your fancied 
rival was like you need not languish in igno- 
rance,” he added, with some touch of scorn. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


77 


“I have her photograph in this desk. I 
have kept it for rny days of humiliation, 
to remind me of what I have been and 
what I may he again. Would you like to 
see it?” 

“ Yes, George, if it will not pain you too 
mueh to show it to me.” 

“Do not talk of pain. You have stirred 
the waters of Marah so deeply that one more 
bitter drop cannot signify.” He unlocked 
his desk as he spoke, lifted the lid, which was 
sustained by a movable upright, and groped 
among the accumulation of papers and 
parchments inside. 

The object for which he was seeking was 
at the back of the desk, under all the papers. 
He found it by touch, a morocco case con- 


taining a cabinet photograph. Mildred stood 
up beside him, with one hand on his shoulder 
as he searched. 

He handed her the case without a word. 
She opened it in silence, and looked at the 
portrait within. A small, delicately featured 
face, with large dark eyes — eyes almost too 
large for the face — a slender throat, thin slop; 
ing shoulders — eyes that looked out of the 
picture with a strange intensity, a curious 
alertness in the countenance as of a woman 
made up of nerves and emotions, a nature 
without the element of repose. 

Mildred stared at the picture three or four 
seconds, and then, with a choking sound like 
a strangled sob, fell swooning at her hus- 
band’s feet. 


BOOK 1L—LACIIESI8 ; OR, THE BEGINNING OE DOOM. 


CHAPTER I. 

A WIFE AND NO WIFE. 


Mr. Castellani’s existence was one of 
those social problems about which the idle 
world loves to speculate. There are a good 
many people in London to whom the idea of 
a fourth dimension is not half so interesting 
as the notion of a man who lives by his wits, 
and yet contrives to get himself dressed by a 
good tailor, and to obtain a footing in some 
of the best houses at the smart end of the 
town. This problem Cesare Castellani had 
offered to the polite world of London for the 
last three seasons. 

Who u Mr. Castellani? was a question still 
asked by a good many people who invited 
the gentleman to their houses and made 
much of his talents. He had not forced an 
entrance into society; nobody had ever de- 
nounced him as a pushing person. He had 
slid so insidiously into his place in the social 
orbit that people had not yet left off wonder- 
ing how he came there, or who had been his 
sponsors. This kind of speculation always 
stimulates the invention of the clever people; 
and these affected to know a good deal more 
about Mr. Castellani than he knew about him- 
self. 

“He came with splendid credentials, and 
an account was opened for him at Coutts’s 
before he arrived,” said Magnus Dudley, the 
society poet, flinging back his long hair with 
a lazy movement of the large languid head. 
“Of course you know that he is a natural 
son of Cavour’s?” 

“ Indeed 1 No, I never heard that. He is 
not like Cavour.” 

“ Of course not, but he is the image of his 
mother — one of the handsomest women in 
Italy — a duchess, and daughter of a Roman 
nobleman who could trace his descent in a 
, clear line from the imperial house. Castellani 
has the blood of Germanic in his veins.” 


“He looks like it; but I have heard on 
pretty good authority that he is the son of a 
Neapolitan music-master.” 

“There are people who will tell you his 
father wheeled a barrow and sold penny ices 
in Whitechapel,” retorted Magnus. “People 
will say anything.” 

Thus and in much otherwise did society 
speculate; and in the mean time Mr. Castella- 
ni’s circle was always widening. His book 
had been just audacious enough and just 
clever enough to make its mark. “ Nepen- 
the” had been one of the successes of the 
season before last, and Mr. Castellani was 
henceforili to be known as the author of 
“Nepenthe.” He had touched upon many 
things below the stars and some things be- 
yond them. He had written of other worlds 
with the confidence of a man who had been 
there. He had written of women with the 
air of a Cafe de Paris Solomon, and of men 
with the tone of a person who never met 
one. 

A man who could write a successful book, 
and could play and sing divinely, was a per- 
son to be cultivated in feminine society. 
Very few men cared to be intimate with Mr. 
Castellani; but among women his influence 
was indisputable. He treated them with a 
courtly deference which charmed them, and 
he made them his slaves. No Oriental des- 
pot ever ruled more completely than Cesare 
Castellani did in half a dozen of those draw- 
ing-rooms which give the tone to scores of 
other drawing-rooms between May Fair and 
Earl’s Court, , He contrived to be in request 
from the dawn to the close of the London 
season, and he had made a favor of going to 
Riverdale, and now, although it suited his 
purpose to be there, he made a favor of his 
prolonged visit. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


79 


“If it were not for the delight of being 
here I should be in one of the loneliest val- 
leys in the Tyrol,” he told Mrs. Hillersdon. 
“I have never stayed in England so long af- 
ter the end of the season. A wild longing 
to break loose from the bonds of Philistinism 
generally seizes me at this time of year. I 
want to go away, and away, and ever away 
from my fellow -men. I should like to go 
and live in a tomb, like Ouida’s Italian hero- 
ine. My thirst for solitude is almost a dis- 
ease.” 

This from a man who spent the greater 
part of his existence dawdling in drawing- 
rooms and boudoirs sounded paradoxical; 
but paradoxes are accepted graciously from 
a man who has written the book of the sea- 
son. Louise Hillersdon treated Castellaui 
like a favorite son. At his bidding she 
brought out the old guitar which had slum- 
bered in its case for nearly a decade, and 
sang the old Spanish songs, and struck the 
strings with the old dashing sweep of the 
taper hand and graceful curve of the round- 
ed arm. 

“ When you sing I could believe you any 
age you like to call yourself,” said Castellaui, 
lolling along the sofa beside the low chair in 
which she was sitting;” I cease even to envy 
the men who knew you w^hen you were a 
girl.” 

“ My dear Castellaui, I feel old enough to 
be your grandmother; unless you are really 
the person I sometimes take you for — ” 

“ Who is that?” 

“ The Wandering Jew.” 

“No matter what my creed or where I 
have w’andered, since I am so happy as to 
find a haven here. Granted that I can re- 
member Nero’s beautiful empress, and Faus- 
tina, and all that procession of fair women 
w'ho illumine the dark ages — and Mary of 
Scotland, and Emma Hamilton, blonde and 
brunette, pathetic and espiegle, every type 
and every variety. It is enough for me to 
find perfection here.” 

“If you only knew how sick I am of that 
kind of nonsense,” said Mrs. Hillersdon, smil- 
ing at him half in amusement, half in bitter- 
ness. 

“Oh, I know that you have drunk the 
wine of praise and worship to satiety. Yet 
if you and I had lived upon the same plane, 
I would have taught you that among a hun- 


j dred adorers one could love you better than 
I all the rest. But it is too late. Our souls 
I may meet and touch perhaps in a new incar- 
' nation.” 

I “Do you talk this kind of nonsense to 
! Mrs. Gres wold or her niece?” 

“No; with them I am all dulness and pro- 
priety. There is nothing simpatica in either 
of them. Miss Ransome is a frank, good- 
[ natured girl — much too frank — with all the 
faults of her species. I find the average girl 
always detestable.” 

“ Miss Ransome has about fifteen hundred 
a year. I suppose you know that?” 

“ Has she really? If ever I marry I hope 
to do better than that,” answered Ccsare, with 
delightful insolence. “ She would be a very 
nice match for a country parson — that Mr. 
Rollinson, for instance, who is getting up the 
concert.” 

“ Then Miss Ransome is not your attrac- 
tion at Enderby. It is Mrs. Greswold who 
draws you.” 

“ Why should I be drawn?” he asked, with 
his languid air. “ I go there in sheer idle- 
ness. They like to liear me play or sing; 
they fool me and praise me; and it is nice to 
be fooled by two pretty women.” 

“ Does Mrs, Greswold take any part in the 
fooling? She looks like marblo.” 

“Tliere is flame under that marble. Mrs. 
Greswold is romantically in love with her 
husband; but that is a complaint which is 
not incurable.” 

“He is not an agreeable man,” said Louise, 
remembering how long George Greswold and 
his wife had held themselves aloof from her, 
“and he does not look like a happy man.” 

“ He is not happy,” 

“You know something about him — more 
than we all know?” asked Louise, with keen 
curiosity. 

“Not much. I met him at Nice before he 
came into his property. He was not a very 
fortunate person at that time, and he doesn’t 
care to_be reminded of it now,” 

“ Was he out-at-elbows, in debt?” 

“Neither. His troubles did not take that 
form. But I am not a gossip. Let the past 
be past, as Goethe says. We can’t change 
it; and it is charity to forget it. If we are 
not sure about what we touch and hear and 
see — or fancy we touch and hear and see — 
in the present, how much less can we be sure 


80 


THE FATAL THREE. 


of any reality of external existence in the 
past? It is all done away with — vanished. 
How can we know that it ever was? A grave 
here and there is the only witness, and even 
the grave and the name on the head-stone 
may be only a projection of our own con- 
sciousness. We are such stuff as dreams are 
made of.” 

“That is a politely circuitous manner of 
refusing to tell me anything about Mr. Gres- 
wold — when his name was Ransome. No 
matter. I shall find other people to tell me 
the scandal, I have no doubt. Your prevari- 
cation assures me that there was a scandal.” 

This was on the eve of the concert at En- 
derby, at about the same hour when George 
Greswold showed Mildred his first wife’s 
portrait. Castellani and his hostess were 
alone together in the lady’s morning-room, 
while Hillersdon and his other guests were 
in the billiard-room on the opposite side of a 
broad corridor. Mrs. Hillersdon had a way 
of turning over her visitors to her husband 
when they bored her. Gusts of noise and 
laughter came across the corridor now and 
again as they played pool. There were times 
when Louise was too tired of life to endure 
the burden of commonplace society. She 
liked to dream over a novel. She liked to 
talk with a clever young man like Castel- 
laui. His flatteries amused her, and brought 
back a faint flavor^ of youth, a dim remem- 
brance of the day when all men had praised 
her, when she had known herself secure in 
the pre-eminence of her charms, without a 
rival. Now other women were beautiful, 
and she was only a tradition. She had toil- 
ed hard to live down her past, to make the 
world forget that she had ever been Louise 
Lorraine; yet there were moments in which 
she felt angry to find that old personality 
of hers so utterly forgotten, when she was 
tempted to cry out, “ What rubbish you talk 
about your Mrs. Egremont, your Mrs. Linley 
Varden, your professional beaiities, and fine 
lady actresses! Have you never heard of 
me — Louise Lorraine?” 

The drawing-rooms at Enderby Manor had 
been so transformed under Mr. Castellani’s 
superintendence, and with the help of his own 
dexterous hands, that there was a unanimous 
. expression of surprise from the county fam- 
ilies as they entered that region of subdued 


light and oBsthetic draperies between three 
and half-past three o’clock on the afternoon 
of the concert. 

The Broadwood grand stood on a plat- 
form in front of a large bay-window, draped 
as no other hand could drape a piano, with 
dark Oriental curtains and Algerian fabrics 
striped with gold, and against the sweeping 
folds of richest color rose a group of tall 
golden lilies out of a great yellow vase, one 
of Minton’s cJief-cVcBuvres. More flowers 
were massed near the end of the piano, and a 
few of the most artistic chairs in the house 
were placed about for the performers. The 
platform, instead of being as other platforms, 
in a straight line across one side of the room, 
was placed diagonally, so as to present the 
more picturesque effect of an angle in the 
background — an angle lighted with tall 
lamps and clusters of wax-candles — a stage 
which looked like a shrine. 

All the windows had been darkened save 
those in the farther drawing-room, which 
opened into the garden, and even these were 
shaded by Spanish hoods, letting in coolness 
and the scent of flowers, but little daylight. 
Thus the only vivid light was on the plat- 
form. 

The auditorium was arranged with a cer- 
tain artistic carelessness — the chairs in curved 
lines, to accommodate the diagonal line of 
the platform; and this fact, in conjunction 
with the prettiness of the stage, put every 
one in good temper before the concert began. 

The concert was as other concerts— clever 
amateur singing, decent amateur playing, fine 
voices cultivated to a certain point, and stop- 
ping just short of perfect training. 

Cesare Castellani’s three little songs — words 
by Heine — setting by Schubert and Jensen — 
were the hit of the afternoon. There were 
few eyes that were unclouded by tears, even 
among those listeners to whom the words 
were in an unknown language. The pathos 
was in the voice of the singer. 

The duet was performed with aplomb, and 
elicited an encore, on which Pamela and 
Castellani sang the old-fashioned “Flow on, 
thou shining river,” which pleased elderly 
people, moving them like a reminiscence of 
long-vanished youth. 

Pamela’s heart beat furiously as she heard 
the applause, and she courtesied herself off 
the platform in a whirl of delight. She felt 


THE FATAL THREE. 81 


that it was in her to be a great public singer 
— a second Patti— if— if she could be taught 
and trained by Castellani. Her head was 
full of vague ideas— a life devoted to music 
— three years’ hard study in Italy — a debut 
at La Scala — a world-wide renown achieved 
in a single night. She even wondered how 
to Italianize her name. “Ransomini? No, 
that would hardly do. Pamelani — Pame- 
letta? What aw Ward names they were, 
Christian and surname both !” 

And then, crimsoning at the mere thought, 
she saw herself announced in large letters — 

Madame Castellani. 

How much easier to make a great name 
in the operatic wmrld with a husband to 
fight one’s battles and get the better of man- 
agers ! 

“With an income of one’s own it ought 
to be easy to make one’s way,” thought Pa- 
mela, as she stood behind the long table in 
the dining-room dispensing tea and coffee, 
with the assistance of maids and footmen. 

Her head was so full of these bewildering 
visions that she was a little less on the alert 
than she ought to have been for shillings 
and half-crowns, insomuch that a few elder- 
ly ladies got their tea and coffee for nothing, 
not being asked for payment, and preferring 
to consider the entertainment gratis. 

Mildred’s part of the concert was perform- 
ed to perfection — not a false note in an ac- 
companiment, or a single fault in the tempo. 
Lady Millborough, a very difficult and exact- 
ing personage, declared she had never been 
so well supported in her cheval de bataille, 
the grand scena in La Gazza Ladra. But 
many among the audience remarked that 
they had never seen Mrs. Greswold look so 
ill; and both Mr. Rollinson and Mr. Castel- 
lani were seriously concerned about her. 

“You are as white as marble,” said the 
Italian. “ I know you are suffering.” 

“I assure you it is nothing. I have not 
been feeling very well lately, and I had a 
sleepless night. There is nothing that need 
give any one the slightest concern. You may 
be sure I shall not break down. I am very 
much interested in the painted window,” she 
added, with a faint smile. 

“It is not for our concert that I fear,” said 
Castellani, in a lower voice. “ It is of you 
and your suffering I am thinking.” 

6 


George Greswold did not appear at the 
concert. He was engaged elsewhere. 

“ I cannot think how Uncle George allow- 
ed himself to have an appointment at Salis- 
bury this afternoon, ” said Pamela. ‘ ‘ I know 
he dotes on music.” 

“ Perhaps he doesn’t dote upon it quite so 
well as to like to see his house turned topsy- 
turvy like this,” said Lady Millborough, who 
would have seen every philanthropic scheme 
in the country collapse for want of funds 
rather than have allowed her own sacred 
drawing-room to be pulled about by amateur 
scene-shifters. 

Mrs. Hillersdon and her party occupied a 
prominent position near the platform; but 
that lady was too clever to make herself con- 
spicuous. She talked to the people who were 
disposed to friendliness — their numbers had 
increased with the advancing years — and she 
placidly ignored those who still held them- 
selves aloof from “that horrid woman.” 
Nor did she in any way appropriate Castel- 
lani as her special protege when the people 
round her were praising him. She took ev- 
erything that happened with the repose which 
stamps the caste of Vere de Vere, and which 
may often be found among women whom the 
Vere de Veres despise. 

All was over; the last of the carriages had 
rolled away. Castellani had been carried off 
in Mrs. Hillersdon’s barouche, no one inviting 
him to stay at the manor-house. Mr. Rollin- 
son lingered to repeat his effusive thanks for 
Mrs. Greswold’s help. 

“It has been a glorious success,” he 
exclaimed; “glorious! Who would have 
thought there was so much amateur talent 
available within thirty miles? And Castel- 
lani was a grand acquisition. We shall 
clear our seventy pounds for the window. 
I don’t know how I can ever thank you 
enough for giving us the use of your lovely 
rooms, Mrs. Greswold, and for letting us pull 
them about as much as we liked.” 

“That did not matter — much,” Mildred 
said, faintly, as she stood on the threshold of 
the hall door in the evening light, the curate 
lingering to reiterate the assurance of his 
gratitude. “Everything can be arranged 
again — easily.” 

She was thinking, with a dull aching at 
her heart, that to her the pulling about and 
disarrangement of those familiar rooms hard- 


82 


THE FATAL THREE. 


ly mattered at all. They were her rooms no 
longer. Enderby was never more to be her 
home. It had been her happy home for thir- 
teen gracious years — years clouded with but 
one natural sorrow, in the loss of her beloved 
father. And now that father’s ghost rose up 
before her, a pale and awful figure, and said, 
“ The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon 
the children, and because of my sin you must 
go forth from the home you love and forsake 
the husband of your heart.” 

She gave the curate an icy-cold hand, and 
turned from him without another word. 

“Poor soul! she is dead beat,” thought 
Mr. Rollinson, as he trudged home to his 
lodgings over a joiner and builder’s shop, 
airy and comfortable rooms enough, but odor- 
ous with the scent of sawdust, and noisy with 
the noise of carpenter’s work. 

He could but think it odd that he had not 
been asked to stay and dine, as he would 
have been in the ordinary course of events. 
He had told the builder’s wife that he should 
most likely dine out, whereupon that friendly 
soul had answered, ‘ ‘ Why, of course they’ll 
ask you, Mr. Rollinson; they’re always glad 
to see you.” 

And now he had to go home to solitude 
and a fresh-killed chop. 

It was seven o’clock, and George Greswold 
had not yet come home from Salisbury. 
Very few words had passed between him 
and his wife since she fell fainting at his 
feet last night. He had summoned her maid, 
and between them they had brought her back 
to consciousness, and half carried her to her 
room. She would give no explanation of her 
fainting-fit when the maid had left the room, 
and she was lying on her bed, white and 
calm, with her husband sitting by her side. 
She told him that she was tired, and that a 
sudden giddiness had come upon her. That 
was all he could get from her. 

“If you will ask me no questions, and 
leave me quite alone, I will try to sleep, so 
that I may be fit for my work in the concert 
to-morrow,” she pleaded. “I would not dis- 
appoint them for worlds.” 

“I don’t think you need be over -anx- 
ious about them,” said her husband, bitterly. 
“ There is more at stake than a painted win- 
dow ; there is your peace and mine. Answer 
me only one question,” he said, with intensi- 
ty of purpose, “had your fainting-fit any- 


thing to do with the portrait of my first 
wife?” 

“I will tell you everything — after the con- 
cert to-morrow,” she answered; “for God’s 
sake leave me to myself till then.” 

“Let it be as you will,” he answered, ris- 
ing suddenly, offended by her reticence. 

He left the room without another word. 
She sprang up from her bed directly he was 
gone, ran to the door and locked it, and tlien 
flung herself on her knees upon the prie-dieu 
chair at the foot of a large carved ivory cru- 
cifix which hung in a deep recess beside the 
old-fashioned fireplace. 

Here she knelt, at intervals, in tears and 
prayer half through the night. At other 
times she walked up and down the room, ab- 
sorbed in thought, by the dim light of the 
night-lamp. 

When the morning light came she went to 
a bookcase in a little closet of a room open- 
ing out of the spacious old bedroom — a case 
containing only devotional books — and of 
these she took out volume after volume — 
“Taylor’s Rule of Conscience,” “Hooker’s 
Religious Polit}^” Butler, Paley — one after 
another, turning over the leaves, looking 
through the indexes, searching for some- 
thing which she seemed unable to find any- 
where. 

“What need have I to see what others 
have thought?” she said to herself at last, 
after repeated failure; ‘'he knows the right. 
I could have no better guide than his opin- 
ion, and he has spoken. What other law 
do I need? His law is the law of God.” 

Not once did her eyes close in sleep all 
through that night, or in the sunny morning 
hours before breakfast. She made an ex- 
cuse for breakfasting in her dressing-room, 
a large, airy apartment, half boudoir. She 
was told that Mr. Greswold had gone out ear- 
ly to see some horses at Salisbury, and would 
not be back till dinner-time. He was to be 
met at the station at half-past seven. 

She had her morning to herself, to do what 
she liked with it. Pamela was rehearsing 
her part in the duet, and in ‘ ‘ Flow on, thou 
shining river,” which was to be sung should 
there be an encore. That occupation, and 
the arrangement of her toilet, occupied the 
young lady till luncheon, allowing for half- 
hourly rushes about the lawn and shrubberies 
with Box, whose health required activity, and 


THE FATAL THREE. 


83 


whose social disposition insisted upon com- 
panionship. 

“ He can’t get on with only Kassaudra. 
She hasn’t intellect enough for him,” said 
Pamela. 

It was only ten minutes before the arrival 
of the performers that Mrs. Greswold went 
down-stairs, pale as ashes but ready for the 
ordeal. She had put on a white gown with a 
little scarlet ribbon about it, lest black should 
make her pallor too conspicuous. 

And now it was nearly seven o’clock, and 
she was alone. The curate had been right in 
pronouncing her dead-beat, but she had some 
work before her yet. She had been w'riting 
letters in the morning. Two of these she 
now placed on the mantle-piece in her bed- 
room ; one addressed to her husband, the oth- 
er to Pamela. 

She had a bag packed — not one of those 
formidable dressing-bags which weigh fifteen 
to twenty pounds, but a light Russia-leather 
bag, just large enough to contain the essen- 
tials of the toilet. She put on a neat little 
black bonnet and a travelling-cloak, and took 
her bag and umbrella, and Avent down to the 
hall. She had given orders that the carriage 
should call for her before going to the sta- 
tion. and she was at the door ready to step 
into it when it came round. 

“Put me down at Ivy Cottage, Brown,” 
she said to the coachman, and was driven off 
unseen by the household, who were all in- 
dulging in a prolonged talk and tea-drinking 
after the excitement of the concert. 

Ivy Cottage was within five minutes’ walk 
of Romsey Station, a little red cottage, newly 
built, with three or four ivy-plants languish- 
ing upon a slack-baked brick w’all, and just 
enough garden for the proverbial cat to dis- 
port himself in at his ease— the swinging of 
cats being no longer an English sport. There 
was nothing strange in Mrs. Greswold alight- 
ing at Ivy Cottage — unless it Avere the hour 
of her visit — for the small brick box was oc- 
cupied by two maiden ladies of small means, 
one a confirmed invalid, the other her con- 
stant and patient nurse, whom the lady of 
Enderby Manor often visited, and in whom 
she was known to be Avarmly interested. 

Brown, the coachman, concluded that his 
mistress was going to spend a quarter of an 
hour with tho two old ladies^ Avhile he Avent 


on and waited for his master at the station, 
and that he was to call for her on his return. 
He did not even ask for her orders upon this 
point, taking the thing for granted. 

He was ten minutes too soon at the sta- 
tion, as every well-conducted coachman ought 
to be, lest, by leaving no margin for accidents, 
he should be too late. 

“ I’m to call for my mistress, sir,” he said, 
as Mr. Greswold stepped into the brougham. 

“Where?” 

“At Ivy Cottage, sir; Miss Fisher’s.” . . 

“Very good.” 

The brougham pulled up at Ivy Cottage, 
and the groom got doAvn and knocked a 
resounding peal upon the Queen Anne 
knocker. 

Hardly possible now'adays to find a knock- 
er that is not after the style of Queen Anne, 
or a newly built twenty-five pound a year 
cottage in any part of England that does not 
offer a faint reminiscence of Bedford Park. 

The groom made his inquiry of the star- 
tled little maid-of-all-AVork, fourteen years 
old last birthday, and already aspiring to bet- 
ter herself as a vegetable-maid in a noble- 
man’s family. 

Mrs. GresAvold had not been at Ivy Cottage 
that evening. 

George GresAvold was out of the brougham 
by this time, hearing the girl’s answer. 

“ Stop Avhere you are,” he said to the coach- 
man, and rail back to the station, an evil au- 
gury in his mind. 

He Avent to the up-platform, the platform 
at Avhich he had alighted ten minutes be- 
fore. 

“Did you see Mrs. Greswold here just 
noAV ?” he asked the station-master, with as 
natural an air as he could command, 

“Yes, sir. She got into the up-train, sir; 
the train by which you came. She came out 
of the waiting-room, sir, the minute after 
you left the platform. You must just have 
missed her.” 

“ Yes, I have just missed her.” 

He Avalked up and doAvn the length of the 
platform two or three times in the thicken- 
ing dusk. Yes, he had missed her. She had 
left him. Such a departure could mean 
only seA^erance— some deep wound— Avhich it 
might take long to heal. It would all come 
right by-and-by. There could be no such 
thing as parting between naan and Avife who 


84 


THE FATAL THREE. 


loved each other as they loved — who were 
incapable of falsehood or wrong. 

What was this jealous fancy that had taken 
possession of her, this unappeasable jealousy 
of the dead past — a passion so strong that it 
had prompted her to rush away from him in 
this clandestine fashion, to torture him by all 
the evidences of an inconsolable grief? His 
heart was heavy as despair itself as he went 
back to the carriage, helpless to do anything 
except go to his deserted home, and see if 
any explanation awaited him there. 

It was half -past eight when the carriage 
drove up to the manor - house. Pamela ran 
out into the hall to receive him. 

“How late you are, uncle!” she cried; 
“and I can’t find aunt. Everything is at 
sixes and sevens. The concert was a pro- 
digious success — and — only think—/ was en- 
cored.” 

“Indeed, dear!” 

“Yes, my duet with him; and then we 
sang the other. They would have liked a 
third, only we pretended not to understand. 
It would have made all the others so fear- 
fully savage if we had undertaken it.” 

This speech was not particularly lucid, 
but it might have been clearer and yet unin- 
telligible to George Greswold. 

“ Do you mind eating your dinner alone 
to-night, my dear Pamela?” he said, trying 
to speak cheerily. “ Your aunt is out — and 
I — I have some letters to write, and I lunch- 
ed heavily at Salisbury.” 

His heavy luncheon had consisted of a bis- 
cuit and a glass of bitter ale at the station. 
His important business had been a long ram- 
ble on Salisbury Plain, alone with his own 
troubled thoughts. The horses were purely 
imaginary. 

“Did your mistress leave any message for 
me?” he asked the butler. 

“No, sir. Nobody saw my mistress go 
out. When Louisa went up to dress her for 
dinner she was gone, sir — but Louisa said 
there was a letter for you on the bedroom 
mantle-piece. Shall I send for it, sir?” 

“No, no— I will go myself. Serve dinner 
at once. Miss Ransome will dine alone.” 

George Greswold went to the bedroom — 
that fine old room, the real Queen Anne room, 
with thick walls and deep-set windows and 
old window-seats, and capacious recesses on 
each side of the high oak chimney-piece, and 


richly moulded wainscot, and massive pan- 
elled doors amid which it is a privilege to 
exist — a spacious, sober old room, with old 
Dutch furniture of the pre-Chippendale era, 
and early English china, Worcester simulat- 
ing Oriental, Chelsea striving after Dresden ; 

I a glorious old room, solemn and mysterious 
as a church in the dim light of two wax-can- 
dles which Louisa the maid had lighted on 
the mantle-piece. 

There, between the candles, appeared the 
two letters : ‘ ‘ George Greswold, Esq. ” ‘ ‘ Miss 
Ransome.” 

The husband’s letter was a thick one, and 
the style of the penmanship showed how the 
I pen had hurried along, driven by the electric 
forces of excitement and despair. 

“ My Beloved, — You asked me last night 
if the photograph which you showed me had 
anything to do with my fainting-fit. It had 
everything to do with it. That photograph 
is a portrait of my unhappy sister, my cruel- 
ly used, unacknowledged sister; and I, who 
have been your wife fourteen years, know 
now that our marriage was against the law 
of God and man — that I -have never been le- 
gally your wife — that our union from the 
first has been an unholy union, and for that 
unlawful marriage the hand of God has been 
[ laid upon us — heavily — heavily — in chastise- 
[ ment, and the darling of our hearts has been 
taken from us. 

‘“Whom he loveth he chasteneth.’ He 
has chastened us, George — perhaps to draw 
us nearer to him. We were too happy, it 
may be, in this temporal life— too much ab- 
i sorbed by our own happiness, living in a 
charmed circle of love and gladness, till that 
awful chastisement came. 

“There is but one course possible to me, 
my dear and honored husband, and that 
course lies in life-long separation. I am run- 
j ning away from my dear home like a crim- 
1 inal, because I am not strong enough to stand 
face to face with you and tell you what must 
be. We must do our best to live out our 
lives asunder, George — we must never meet 
again as wedded lovers — such as we have 
been for fourteen years. God knows my af- 
fection for you has grown and strengthened 
with every year of union ; and yet it seems 
to me, on looking back, that my heart went 
out to you in all the fulness of an infinite 


fBE FATAL THREE. 


love when first we stood, hand clasped in 
hand, beside the river. If you are angry 
with me, George — if you harden your heart 
?igainst me because I do that which I know 
to be my duty, at least believe that I never 
loved you better than in this bitter hour of 
parting. I spent last night in prayer and 
thought. If there were any way of escape, 
any possibility of living my own old happy 
life with a clear conscience, I think God 
would have shown it to me in answer to my 
prayers; but there was no ray of -light, no 
gleam of hope. Conscience answers sternly 
and plainly. By the law of God I have never 
been your wife, and his law commands me 
to break an unhallowed tie, although my 
heart may break with it. 

“Do you remember your argument with 
Mr. Cancellor? I never saw you so vehement 
in any such dispute, and you took the side 
which I can but think the side of the Evil 
One. That conversation now seems to me 
like a strange foreshadowing of sorrow — a 
lesson meant for my guidance. Little did I 
the<i think that this question could ever have 
any bearing on my own life; but I recall ev- 
ery word now, and I remember how earnest- 
ly my old master spoke — how fearlessly he 


85 

held to the right. Can I doubt his wisdom 
from whose lips I first learned the Christian 
law, and in whom I first saw the Christian 
life? 

“ I have written to Pamela begging her to 
stay with you, to take my place in the house- 
hold, and to be to you as an adopted daugh- 
ter. May God be merciful to us both in this 
heavy trial, George. Be sure he will deal 
with us mercifully if we do our duty accord- 
ing to the light that is given to us. 

“I shall stay to-night in Queen Anne’s 
Gate with Mrs. Tomkison. Please send Louisa 
to me to-morrow with luggage for a long ab- 
sence from home. She will know what to 
bring. You can tell her that I am going 
abroad for my health. My intention is to go 
to some small watering-place in France or 
Germany, where I can vegetate, away from 
all beaten tracks, and from the people who 
know us. You may rely upon me to bear 
my own burden, and to seek sympathy and 
consolation from no earthly comforter. 

“ Do not follow me, George, should your 
heart urge you to do so. Respect my solemn 
resolution, the result of many prayers. 

“Your ever-loving 

“Mildred.” 


CHAPTER 11. 

SOONER OR LATER. 


George Greswold read his wife’s letter I 
a second time with increasing perplexity and | 
trouble of mind. Her sister! What could 
this mean? She had never told him of the 
existence of a sister. She had been described 
by her father, by every one, as an only child. 
She had inherited the whole of her father’s 
fortune. 

“Her cruelly used, unacknowledged sis- 
ter!” 

Those words indicated a social mystery, 
and as he read and reread those opening 
lines of his wife’s letter he remembered her 
reticence about that girl - companion from 
whom she had been parted so early. He re- 
membered her sudden blush, and confused 
air, when he questioned her about the girl 
she called Fay. 


I The girl had been sent to a finishing-school 
[at Brussels, and Mildred had seen her no 
more. 

His first wife had finished her education at 
Brussels She had talked to him often of the 
fashionable boarding-school, m the quaint old 
street near the cathedral, and the slights she 
had endured there from other girls because 
of her isolation. There was no stint in the 
payment of her education. She had as many 
masters as she cared to have. She was as 
well dressed as the richest of her compan- 
ions. But she was nobody, and belonged to 
nobody, could give no account of herself that 
would satisfy those merciless inquisitors. 

This is what his wife had told him of her 
school-days at Brussels; his wife Vivien, the 
young English lady whom he had met at 


86 


THE FATAL THREE. 


Florence. She was travelling in the care of | 
an English painter and his wife, who had 
other girls in their charge. She submitted 
to no authority, had ample means, and was 
thoroughly independent. She did not get on 
very well with either the artist or his wife. 
She had a knack of saying disagreeable 
things, and a tongue exceeding hitter in one 
so young. “A difficult subject,” the paint- 
er called her, and imparted to his particular 
friends in confidence that his wife and Miss 
Faux were always quarrelling. Vivien Faux, 
that was the name borne by the girl whom 
he met nineteen years ago at an evening par- 
ty in Florence; that was the name of the girl 
he had married, after briefest acquaintance, 
knowing no more about her than that she 
had a fortune of thirty thousand pounds 
when she came of age, and that the trustee 
and custodian of that fortune was a lawyer 
in Lincoln’s Inn, who affected no authority 
over her, and put no difficulties in the way 
of her marrying. 

He remembered how, when he first saw Mil- 
dred Fausset, something in her fresh young 
beauty, some indefinable peculiarity of ex- 
pression or contour, had recalled the image 
of his dead wife, that image which never 
occurred to him without keenest pain. He 
remembered how strange that vague, inde- 
scribable resemblance had seemed to him, 
and how he had asked himself if it had any 
real existence, or were only the outcome of his 
own troubled mind reverting incessantly to 
an agonizing memory. 

“Her face may come back to me in the 
faces of other women, as it comes back to me 
in my miserable dreams,” he told himself. 

But as the years went by he became con- 
vinced that the likeness was not imaginary. 
There were points of resemblance. The del- 
icate tracing of the eyebrows, the form of | 
the brow, the way the hair grew above the 
temples, were curiously alike. He came to j 
accept the likeness as one of those chance j 
resemblances which are common enough in | 
life. It suggested to him nothing more than 
that. 

He went to the library with the letter still 
in his hand. His lamp was readily lighted, 
and, the September evening being chilly, 
there was a wood fire on the low hearth, 
which gave an air of cheerfulness to the 
sombre room. 


He rang, and told the footman to send Mrs. 
Bell to him. 

Bell appeared, erect and severe of aspect 
as she had been four -and -twenty years be- 
fore; neatly dressed in black silk, with braid- 
ed gray hair, and a white lace cap. 

“ Sit down, Mrs. Bell, I have a good many 
questions to ask you,” said Greswold, mo- 
tioning her to a chair on the farther side of 
his desk. 

He was sitting with his eyes fixed, looking 
at the spot where Mildred had fallen sense- 
less at his feet. He sat for some moments 
in a reverie, and then turned suddenly, un- 
locked his desk, and took out the photo- 
graph which he had shown Mildred last 
night. 

“Did you ever see that face before, Bell?” 
he asked, handing her the open case. 

“Good gracious, sir! yes, indeed, I ^hould 
think I did; but Miss Fay was younger than 
that when she came to Parchment Street.” 

“Did you see much of her in Parchment 
Street?” 

“ Yes, sir, a good deal, and at The Hook 
too; a good deal more than I wanted to. I 
didn’t hold with her being brought into our 
house, sir.” 

“Why not?” 

“I didn’t think it was fair to my young 
mistress. ” 

“But how was it unfair?” 

“Well, sir, I don’t wish to say anything 
against the dead, and Mr. Fausset was a lib- 
eral master to me, and I make no doubt that 
he died a penitent man. He was a regular 
church-goer, and an upright man in all his 
ways while I lived with him ; but right is 
right, and I shall always maintain that it 
was a cruel thing to a young wife like Mrs. 
Fausset, who doted on the ground he walked 
upon, to bring his natural daughter into the 
house.” 

“Mrs. Bell, do you know that this is a 
serious accusation you are bringing against 
a dead man, who cannot rise up and gain- 
say you ?” said George Greswold, solemnly. 
“Now, what grounds have you for saying 
that this girl” — with his hand upon the 
photograph— “ was Mr. Fausset’s daughter?” 

“What grounds, sir? I don’t want any 
grounds. I’m not a lawyer to put things 
in that way; but I know what I know. 
First and foremost, she was the image of 


THE FATAL THREE. 


87 


him; and next, why did he bring her home, 
and want her to be made one of the family, 
and treated as a sister by Miss Mildred, if she 
wasn’t her 'sister?” 

“She may have been the daughter of a 
friend.” 

“People don’t do that kind of thing — 
don’t run the risk of making a wife mis- 
erable to oblige a friend,” retorted Bell, 
scornfully. “Besides, I say again, if she 
wasn’t his own flesh and blood, why was she 
so like him?” 

“She may have been the daughter of a 
near relation.” 

“He had but one near relation in the 
world, his only sister, a young lady who 
was so difficult to please that she refused 
no end of good offers, and of such a pious 
turn that she has devoted her life to doing 
good for the last five-and-twenty years, to my 
certain knowledge. I hope, sir, you would 
not insinuate that she had a natural daugh- 
ter?” 

“ She may have made a secret marriage, 
perhaps, known only to her brother.” 

“She couldn’t have done any such thing, 
sir ; she was much too well looked after. 
She was quite a young girl, and hadn’t been 
brought out at the time of Miss Fay’s birth. 
Don’t mix Miss Fausset up in it, pray, sir.” 

“ Was it you only who suspected Mr. Faus- 
set to be Miss Fay’s father?” 

“Only me, sir? Wliy, it was everybody; 
and what was worst of all, my poor mistress 
knew it, and fretted over it to her dying 
day.” 

“But you never heard Mr. Fausset ac- 
knowledge the parentage?” 

“No, sir, not to me; but I have no doubt 
he acknowledged it to his poor, dear lady. 
He was an affectionate husband, and he 
must have been very much wrapped up in 
that girl, or he wouldn’t have made his wife 
unhappy about her.” 

With but the slightest encouragement from 
Mr. Greswold, Bell expatiated on the subject 
of Fay’s residence in the two houses, and the 
misery she had wrought there. She uncon- 
sciously exaggerated the general conviction 
about the master’s relationship to his protegee 
nor did she hint that it was she who first 
mooted the notion in the Parchment Street 
household. She left George Greswold with 
the belief that this relationship had been 


known for a fact to a great many people — 
that the tie between protector and protected 
was an open secret. 

She dwelt much upon the child Mildred’s 
love for the elder girl, which she seemed to 
think in itself an evidence of their sisterhood. 
She gave a graphic account of Mildred’s ill- 
ness, and described how Fay had watched 
beside her bed night after night. 

“ I saw her sitting there in her night-gown 
many a time when I went in the middle of 
the night to see if Mildred was asleep. I 
never liked Miss Fay, but justice is justice, 
and I must say, looking back upon all things,” 
said Bell, with a virtuous air, “ that there 
was no deception about her love for Miss 
IVlildred. I may have thought it put on 
then, but looking back upon it now I know 
that it was real.” 

“ I can quite understand that my wife 
must have been very fond of sueh a com- 
panion— -sister or no sister — but she was so 
young that no doubt she soon forgot her 
friend. Memory is not tenacious at seven 
years old,” said Greswold, with an air of 
quiet thoughtfulness, cutting the leaves of a 
new book which had lain on his desk, the 
paper-knife marking the page where he had 
thrown it down yesterday afternoon. 

“ Indeed she didn’t forget, sir. You must 
not judge Miss Mildred by other girls of 
seven. She was— she was like Miss Lola, 
sir ” — Bell’s elderly voice broke a little here. 
“ She was all love and thoughtfulness. She 
doted on Miss Fay, and I never saw such 
grief as she felt when she came back from 
the sea-side and found her, gone. It was 
done for the best, and it was the only thing 
my mistress could do, with any regard for 
her own self-respect ; but even I felt very 
sorry Miss Fay had been sent away, when I 
saw what a blow it was to Miss Mildred. 
She didn’t get over it for years; and though 
she was a good and dutiful daughter, I know 
that she and her mother had words about 
Miss Fay more than once.” 

“She was very fond of her, was she?” 
murmured George Greswold, in an absent 
way, steadily cutting the leaves of his book. 
“Very fond of her. And you have no 
doubt in your own mind, Mrs. Bell, that the 
two were sisters?” 

“Not the least doubt, sir. I never had,” 
answered Bell, resolutely. 


88 


THE FATAL THREE. 


She waited for him to speak again, but he 
sat silent, cutting slowly, carefully through 
the big volume, making not one jagged edge, 
so steady was the movement of the large, 
strong hand that grasped the paper-knife. 
His eyes were bent upon the book, his face 
was in shadow. 

“ Is that all, sir?” Bell asked at last, when 
she had grown tired of his silence. 

“Yes, Mrs. Bell, that will do. Good- 
night.” 

When the door closed upon her he flung 
the book away from him, sprang to his feet, 
and began to pace the room, up and down its 
length of forty feet, from hearth-stone to door. 

“Sisters — and so fond of each other,” he 
muttered. “ My God, this is fatality. In this, 
as in the death of my beloved child, I am 
helpless. The wanton neglect of my serv- 
ants cost me the darling of my heart. It 
was not my fault — not mine — but I lost her. 
And now the curtain rises on another act in 
the tragedy, and I see myself again the vic- 
tim — a wretch, blind, miserable — groping in 
the dark web of fate — caught in the inexo- 
rable net.” 

He went back to his desk by-and-by and 
reread Mildred’s letter in the light of the 
solitary lamp. 

“ She leaves me because our marriage is 


unholy in her eyes,” he said to himself. 
“ What will she think when she knows all — 
as she must know, I suppose, sooner or later? 
Sooner or later all things are known, says 
one of the wise ones of the earth. Sooner 
or later. She is on the track now. Sooner 
or later she must know everything.” 

He flung himself into a low chair in front 
of the hearth, and sat with his elbows on his 
knees, staring at the fire. 

“ If it were that question of legality only,” 
he said to himself, “if it were a question of 
Church, law, bigotry, prejudice, I should not 
fear the issue. My love for her, and hers 
for me, would be stronger than any such 
prejudice. It would need but the first sharp 
taste of severance to bring her back to me, 
my fond and faithful wife, willing to submit 
her judgment to mine, willing to believe, as 
I believe, that such marriages are just and 
holy, such bonds pure and true all over the 
world, even though one country may allow 
and another disallow, one colony tie the knot 
and another loosen it. If it were that alone 
which parts us, I should not fear. But it is 
the past, the spectral past which rises up to 
thrust us asunder. Her sister ! And they 
loved each other as David and Jonathan 
loved, with the love whose inheritance is a 
life-long regret.” 


CHAPTER III. 

THE COUNSEL OF THE CHUECH. 


It was nearly eleven o’clock when Mrs. 
Gres wold arrived at Waterloo. There had 
been half an hour’s loss of time at Bishop- 
stoke, where she changed trains, and the 
journey had seemed interminable to the ever- 
active brain of that solitary traveller. Never 
before had she so journeyed, never during 
the fourteen years of her married life had 
she sat behind an engine that was carrying 
her away from her husband. No words 
could speak that agony of severance, or ex- 
press the gloom of the future — stretching 
before her in one monotonous dead-level of 
desolation — which was to be spent away from 
him. 

, “If I were a Roman Catholic I would go 


into a convent to-morrow; I would lock my- 
self forever from the outer world,” she 
thought, feeling that the world could be 
nothing to her without him” 

And then she began to ponder seriously 
upon those sisterhoods in which the Angli- 
can Church is now almost as rich as the 
Roman. She thought of those women with 
whom she had been occasionally brought in 
contact, whom she had been able to help 
sometimes with her purse and with her sym- 
pathy, and she knew that when the hour 
came for her leaving the world there would 
be many homes open to receive her, many a 
good work worthy of her labor. 

“I am not like those good women,” she' 


THE FATAL THREE. 


89 


thought; ‘‘the prospect seems to me so 
dreary. I have loved the world too well. I 
love it still, even after all that I have lost.” 

She had telegraphed to her friend, Mrs. 
Tomkison, and that lady was at the terminus 
with her neat little brougham, and with an 
enthusiastic welcome. 

“ It is so sweet of you to come to me,” she 
exclaimed; “but I hope it is not any worry- 
ing business that has brought you up to town 
so suddenly — papers to sign, or anything of 
that kind.” 

Mrs. Tomkison was literary and aBSthetic, 
and had the vaguest notions upon all busi- 
ness details. She was an ardent champion 
of w^oman’s rights, sent Mr. Tomkison off to 
the city every morning to earn money for 
her milliners, decorators, fads, and proteges 
of every kind, and reminded him every even- 
ing of his intellectual inferiority. She had 
an idea that women of property were inevi- 
tably plundered by their husbands, and that 
it was one of the conditions of their existence 
to be trapped and wheedled into signing 
away their fortunes for the benetit of spend- 
thrift partners, she herself being in the im- 
pregnable position of never having brought 
her husband a sixpence. 

“No, it is hardly a business matter, Cecilia. 

I am only in town en passant. I am going 
to my aunt at Brighton to-morrow. I knew 
you would give me a night’s shelter, and it 
is much nicer to be with you than to go to a 
hotel. The house in Parchment Street is 
still let, as you know; and if it were empty 
I should not go there. I have never entered 
it since the day of my father’s funeral.” 

The fact was that of two evils Mildred had , 
chosen the lesser. She had shrunk from the 
idea of meeting her lively friend, and being 
subjected to the ordeal of that lady’s curios- 
ity; but it had seemed still more terrible to 
her to enter a strange hotel at night and 
alone. She who had never travelled alone, 
who had been so closely guarded by a hus- 
band’s thoughtful love, felt herself helpless 
as a child in that beginning of loneliness. 

“I should have thought it simply detest- 
able of you if you had gone to a hotel,” 
protested Cecilia, who affected strong lan- 
guage. “We can have a delicious hour of 
confidential talk. I sent Adam to bed be- 
fore I came out. He is an excellent, devoted 
creature; has just made what calls a pot 


of money on Mexican street railways ; but 
he is a dreadful bore when one wants to be 
alone with one’s dearest friend. I have or- 
dered the nicest little supper — a few natives, 
only just in, and a brace of grouse, and a 
bottle of the only champagne which smart 
people will hear of nowadays.” 

‘•I am so sorry you troubled about sup- 
per,” said Mildred, not at all curious about 
the last fashion in champagne. “I could 
not take anything — unless it were a cup of 
tea.” 

“But you must have dined early, or hur- 
riedly, at any rate. I hate that kind of din- 
ner — everything hurried and huddled over — 
and the carriage announced before the piece 
de resistance. And so you’re going to your 
aunt. Is she ill? Has she sent for you at 
a moment’s notice? You will come into all 
her money, no doubt. I am told she is im- 
mensely rich.” 

“I have never thought about her money.” 

“I suppose not, you lucky creature. It 
will be sending coals to Newcastle in your 
case, your father left you so rich. I am told 
Miss Fausset gives no end of money to her 
church people. She has put in two painted 
windows at St. Edmund’s ; a magnificent 
rose over the porch, and a window in the 
south transept by Burne Jones — a delicious 
design— St. Cecilia sitting at an organ, with 
a cloud of cherubs. By-the-bye, talking of 
St. Cecilia, how did you like my friend Cas- 
tellani? He wu'ote me a dear little note of 
gratitude for my introduction, so I am sure 
you were very good to him.” 

“I could not dishonor any introduction 
I of yours; besides, Mr. Castellani’s grandfa- 
ther and my father had been friends. That 
was a link.” 

“ How do you like him? But here we are 
at home. You shall tell me more while we 
are at supper.” 

Mildred had to sit down to the oysters 
and grouse whether she would or no. The 
dining-room was charming in the daytime, 
with its view of the Park. At night it might 
have been a room excavated from the ruins 
of Herculaneum, so strictly classic were its 
terra-cotta draperies, hanging all round the' 
room on brass rods, its swinging butter-boat 
lamps and curule chairs. 

‘ ‘ How sad to see you unable to eat any- 
thing !” protested Mrs. Tomkison, snapping 


90 


THE FATAL THREE. 


up the natives with gusto, for it may be ob- 
served that the people who wait up for trav- 
ellers or for friends coming home from the 
play are always hungrier than those who so 
return. , “You shall have your cup of tea 
directly.” 

Mildred had eaten nothing since her apol- 
ogy for a breakfast. She was faint with fast- 
ing, but had no appetite, and the odor of the 
savory grouse, the fried bread-crumbs and 
gravy, in which her friend was revelling, 
sickened her. She withdrew to a chair by 
the tire, and had a dainty little tea-tray placed 
beside her, while Mrs. Tomkison did justice 
to one of the birds, talking all the time. 

“Isn’t he a gifted creature?” she asked, 
helping herself to the second side of the 
breast. 

Mildred almost thought she was speaking 
of the grouse. 

“I mean Castellani,” said Cecilia, in an- 
swer to her look of wonder. “Isn’t he a 
heap of talent? You heard him play, of 
course — and you heard his divine voice? 
When I think of his genius for music, and 
remember that he wrote that book, I am ac- 
tually wonder-struck.” 

“ 'The book is clever, no doubt,” answered 
Mildred, thoughtfully, “ almost too clever to 
be quite sincere. And as for genius— well, 
I suppose his musical talent does almost 
reach genius; and yet what more can one 
say of Mozart, Beethoven, or Chopin? Ithink 
genius is too large a word for any one less 
than they.” 

“But I say he is a genius,” cried Mrs. Tom- 
kison, elated by grouse and dry sherry — the 
champagne had been put aside when Mildred 
refused it. ‘ ‘ Does he not carry one out of 
one’s self by his playing; does not his singing 
open the floodgates of our hard, battered 
old hearts? No one ever interested me so 
much.” 

“Have you known him long?” 

“ For the last three seasons. He is with 
me three or four times a week when he is in 
town. He is like a sou of the house.” 

“ And does Mr. Tomkison like him?” 

“Oh, you know Adan^,” said Cecilia, with 
an expressive shrug. “You know Adam’s 
way. He doesn’t mind. ‘ You always must 
have somebody hanging about you,’ he said, 
‘ so you may as well have that French fool 
, as any one else.’ Adam calls all foreigners 


Frenchmen, if they are not obtrusively Ger- 
man in their accent. Castellani has been 
devoted to me, and I dare say I may have 
got myself talked about on his account,” 
pursued Cecilia, with the pious resignation 
of a blameless matron of flve-and-forty, who 
rather likes to think herself suspected of an 
intrigue; “but I can’t help that. He is one 
of the few young men I have ever met who 
understand me. And then we are such near 
neighbors, and it is easy for him to run in 
at any hour. ‘ You ought to give him a 
latch-key,’ said Adam; ‘it would save the 
servants a lot of trouble.’ ” 

“Yes, I remember, he lives in Queen 
Anne’s Mansions,” Mildred answered, list- 
lessly. 

“He has a suite of rooms near the top, 
looking over half London, and so prettily 
furnished. He gives afternoon tea to a few 
chosen friends who don’t mind the lift; and 
we have had a materialization in his rooms, 
but it wasn’t a particularly good one,” added 
Mrs. Tomkison, as if she were talking of 
something to eat. 

The maid Louisa arrived at Queen Anne’s 
Gate a little before luncheon on the following 
day. She brought a considerable portion of 
Mrs. Greswold’s belongings in two large bas- 
ket-trunks, a portmanteau, and a dressing- 
bag. These were at once sent on to Victoria 
in the cab that had brought the young person 
and the luggage from Waterloo, while the 
young person herself was accommodated 
with dinner, table-beer, and gossip in the 
servants’ hall. She also brought a letter 
for her mistress — a letter written by George 
Greswold late on the night before. 

Mildred could hardly tear open the en- 
velope for the trembling of her hands. How 
would he write to her? Would he plead 
against her decision ; would he try to make 
her waver; would he set love against law in 
such eloquent and irresistible words as love 
alone can use? She knew her own weak- 
ness and his strength, and she opened his 
letter full of fear for her own resolution. 

There was no passionate pleading. The 
letter was measured almost to coldness: 

“I need not say that your departure, to- 
gether with your explanation of that depart- 
ure, has come upon me as a crushing blow. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


91 


Your reasons in your own mind are doubt- 
less unanswerable; I cannot even endeavor 
to gainsay them. I could only seem to you 
as a special pleader, making the worse ap- 
pear the better cause for my own selfish ends. 
You know my opinion upon this hard-fought 
question of marriage with a deceased wife’s 
sister; and you know how widely it differs 
from Mr. Cancellor’s view and yours, which, 
to my mind, is the view of the bigot and not 
the Christian. There is no word in Christ’s 
teaching to forbid such marriages. Your 
friend and master, Clement Canceller, is of 
the school which sets the wisdom of a me- 
diaeval church above the wisdom of Christ. 
Am I to lose my wife because Mr. Canceller 
is a better Christian than his divine Master? 

“ But granted that you are fixed in this 
way of thinking, that you deem it your duty 
to break your husband’s heart and make his 
home desolate rather than tolerate the idea 
of union with one who was once married to 
your half-sister, let me ask you at least to con- 
sider whether you have sufficient ground for 
believing that my first wife was verily your 
father’s daughter. In the first place, your 
only evidence of the identity between my 
wife and the girl you call Fay consists of a 
photograph which bears a striking likeness 
to the girl you knew, a likeness which I am 
bound to say Bell saw as instantly as you 
yourself had seen it. Remember that the 
strongest resemblances have been found be- 
tween those who were of no kin to each oth- 
er, and remember that more than one judi- 
cial murder has been committed on the 
strength of just such a likeness. 

“ The main point at issue, however, is not 
so much the question of identity as the ques- 
tion whether the girl Fay was actually your 
father’s daughter, and from my cross-exam- 
ination of Bell, it appears to me that the evi- 
dence against your father in this matter is 
one of impressions only, and even, as circum- 
stantial evidence, too feeble to establish any 
case against the accused. Is it impossible 
for a man to be interested in an orphan girl, 
and to be anxious to establish her in his own 
home as a companion for his only child, un- 
less that so-called orphan were his own daugh- 
ter, the offspring of a hidden intrigue? There 
may be stronger evidence as to Fay’s parent- 
age than the suspicions of servants, or your 
mother’s jealousy; but as yet I have arrived 


at none. You possibly may know much 
more than Bell knows, more than your letter 
implies. If it is not so, if you are acting on 
casual suspicions only, I can but say that 
you are prompt to strike a man whose heart 
has been sorely tried of late, and who had a 
special claim upon your tenderness by reason 
of that recent loss. 

“ I can write no more, Mildred. My heart 
is too heavy for many words. I do not re- 
proach you. I only ask you to consider 
what you are doing, before you make our 
parting irrevocable. You have entreated me 
not to follow you, and I will obey you so far 
as to give you ample time for reflection be- 
fore I force myself upon your presence; but 
I must see you before you leave England. 
I ask no answer to this letter until we meet. 

“ Your loving and unhappy husband, 

“George Greswold.” 

The letter chilled her by its calm logic, its 
absence of passion. There seemed very little 
of the lover left in a husband who could so 
write. His contempt for a law which to her 
was sacred shocked her almost as an open 
declaration of unbelief. His sneer at Clem- 
ent Canceller wounded her to the quick. 

She answered her husband’s letter imme- 
diately. 

“Alas, my beloved 1” she wrote, “my rea- 
son for believing Fay to have been my sister 
is unanswerable. My mother on her death- 
bed told me of the relationship; told me her 
sad secret with bitter tears. The knowledge 
of that story in the past had cast a shadow 
on the latter years of her married life. I 
had seen her unhappy without knowing the 
cause. On her death-bed she confided in me. 
I was almost a woman then, and old enough 
to understand what she told me. Women 
are so jealous where they love, George. I 
suffered many a sharp pang after my dis- 
covery of your previous marriage. I was 
jealous of that unknown rival who had gone 
before me, little dreaming that fatal marriage 
was to cancel my own. 

‘ ‘ My mother’s witness is indisputable. She 
must have known. And as I grew older I 
saw that there was something in my father’s 
manner when Fay was mentioned that indi- 
cated some painful secret. The time came 
when I was careful to avoid the slightest al- 


92 


THE FATAL THREE. 


lusion to my lost sister, but in my own mind 
and in my own heart I guarded her image as 
the image of a sister. 

“I am grieved that you should despise 
Mr. Cancellor and his opinions. My relig- 1 
ious education was derived entirely from him. | 
My father and mother were both careless, I 
though neither was unbelieving. He taught ^ 
me to care for spiritual things. He taught 
me to look to a better life than the best we | 
can lead here, and in this dark hour I thank 
and bless him for having so taught me. 
What should I be now, adrift on a sea of | 
trouble, without the compass of faith and i 
duty? I will steer by that, George, even 
though it carry me away from him I shall al- 
ways devotedly love. Ever in severance as in | 
union, Your loving 

“ Mildred.” 

She had written to Mr. Cancellor early that 
morning, asking him to call upon her before 
four o’clock. He was announced a few 
minutes after she finished her letter, and she 
went to the drawing-room to receive him. 

His rusty black coat, and shabby felt hat 
crumpled carelessly in his bare and bon}^ 
hand, looked curiously out of harmony with 
Mrs. Tomkison’s drawing-room, which was 
the passion of her life, the heathen temple 
to which she carried gold and frankincense 
and myrrh, in the shape of rose du Barri and 
bleue du roi Sevres, veritable old Sherraton 
tables and chairs, and gems in the shape of 
commodes and cabinets from the boudoir of 
Marie Antoinette, a lady who must assured- 
ly have sat at more tables and written at 
more escritoires than any other woman in ' 
the world. Give her Majesty only five min- 
utes for every table, and ten for every bon- 
heur dujour attributed to her possession, and 
her life would have been longer than the 
span which she was granted of joy and grief 
between the passing of the marriage-ring and 
the fall of the axe. 

Unsightly as that dark figure showed 
amid the delicate tertiaries of Lyons bro- 
cades and the bright coloring of satin-wood 
tables and Sevres porcelain, Mr. Cancellor 
was perfectly at his ease in Mrs Tomkison’s 
drawing-room. He wasted very few of his 
hours in such rooms, albeit there were many 
such in which his presence was courted; but 
seldom as he appeared amid such surround- 


ings, he was never disconcerted by them. He 
was not easily impressed by externals. The 
tilth and squalor of a London slum troubled 
him no more than the artistic intricacies of a 
West End drawing-room in which the culte 
of the Beautiful left him no room to put 
down his hat. It w^as humanity for which 
he cared — persons, not things. His soul went 
straight to the souls he was anxious to save. 
He was narrow, perhaps; but in that narrow- 
ness there was a concentrative power that 
could work wonders. 

One glance at Mildred’s face showed him 
that she was distressed, and that her trouble 
was no small thing. He held her hand in 
his long lean fingers, and looked at her ear- 
nestly as he said, 

“You have something to tell me— some 
sorrow.” 

“Yes,” she answered, “an incurable sor- 
row.” 

She burst into tears, the first she had shed 
since she left her home, and sobbed passion- 
ately for some moments, leaning against a 
Trianon spinet, raining her tears upon the 
Vernis Martin in a way that would have 
made Mrs. Tomkison’s blood run cold. 

“How weak I am!” she said, impatiently, 
as she dried her eyes and choked back her 
sobs. “I thought I was accustomed to 
my sorrow by this time. God knows it is 
no new thing. It seems a century old al- 
ready.” 

“ Sit down, and tell me all about it,” said 
Clement Cancellor, quietly, drawing forward 
a chair for her, and then seating himself by 
her side. “ I cannot help you till you have 
told me all your trouble, and you know I 
shall help you if I can. I shall sympathize 
with you in any case.” 

“ Yes, I am sure of that,” she answered, 
sadly; and then falteringly but clearly she 
told him the whole story, from the beginning 
in the days of her childhood till the end yes- 
terday. She held back nothing, she spared 
no one. Freely as to her father confessor 
she told all. 

“I have left him forever,” she concluded. 
“ Have I done right?” 

“Yes, you have done right. Anything 
less than that would have been less than 
right. If you are sure of your facts as to 
the relationship — if Mr. Greswold’s first wife 
was your father’s daughter — there was no 


THE FATAL THREE. 


other course open to you. There was no al- 
ternative.” 

“And my marriage is invalid in law?” 
questioned Mildred, 

“ I do not think so. The law is full of in- 
iquities. If this young lady was your fa- 
ther’s natural daughter she had no status in 
the eye of the law. She was not your sister 
— she belonged to no one, in the eye of the 
law. She had no right to bear 5'-our father’s 
name. So, if you accept the civil law for your 
guide, you may still be George Greswold’s wife 
— you may ignore the tie between you and his 
first wife. Legally it has no existence.” 

Mildred crimsoned, and then grew deadly 
pale. In the eye of the law her marriage 
was valid. She was not a dishonored wom- 
an — a wife and no wife. She might still 
stand by her husband’s side — go down to 
the grave as his companion and sweetheart. 
They who so short a time ago were wedded 
lovers might be lovers again, all clouds dis- 
persed — the sunshine of domestic peace upon 
their path-way — if she were content to be 
guided by the law. 

“ Should you think me justified if I were 
to accept my legal position, and shut my eyes 
to all the rest?” she asked, knowing but too 
well what the answer would be. 

“ Should I so think! Oh, Mildred, do you 
know me so little that you have any need to 
ask such a question? When have I ever 
taken the law for my guide? Have I not 
defied that law when it stood between me 
and my faith? Am I not ready to defy it 
again were the choice between conscience 
and law forced upon me? To my mind your 
half-sister’s position makes not one jot of 
difference. She was not the less your sister 
because of her parents’ sin, and your mar- 
riage with the man who was her husband is 
not the less an incestuous marriage.” 

The word struck Mildred like a whip — 
stung the wounded heart like the sharp cut 
of a lash, 

“Not one word more,” she cried, holding 
up her hands as if to ward off a blow. “ If 
my union with my — very dear — husband was 
a sinful union, I was an unconscious sinner. 
The bond is broken forever— I shall sin no 
more.” 

Her tears came again; but this time they 
gathered slowly on the weary lids, and rolled 
slowly down the pale cheeks, while she sat 


93 

with her eyes fixed, looking straight before 
her in dumb despair. 

“ Be sure all will be well with you if you 
cleave to the right, ’’said the priest, with grave 
tenderness, feeling for her as acutely as an 
ascetic can feel for the grief that springs 
from earthly passions and temporal loves, 
sympathizing as a mother sympathizes with 
a child that sobs over a broken toy. The 
toy is a worthless, futile thing, but to the 
child priceless. 

“What are you going to do with your 
life?” he asked, gently, after a long pause, in 
which he had given her time to recover calm- 
ness and self-possession. 

“I hardly know. I shall go to Germany 
next month, I think, and choose some out-of- 
the-way nook, where I can live quietly, and 
then for the winter I may go to Italy or the 
south of France. A year hence perhaps I 
may enter a sisterhood; but I do not want 
to take such a step hurriedly.” 

“No, not hurriedly,” said Mr. Cancellor, 
his face lighting up suddenly, as that pale, 
thin, irregular-featured face could light itself 
with the divine radiance from within; “not 
hurriedly, not too soon; but I feel assured 
that it would be a good thing for you to do 
— the sovereign cure for a broken life. You 
think now that happiness would bo impossi- 
ble for you, anywhere, anyhow. Believe me, 
my dear Mildred, you would find it in doing 
good to others. A vulgar remedy, an old 
woman’s recipe, perhaps, but infallible. A 
life lived for the good of others is always a 
happy life. You know the glory of the sky 
at sunset — there is nothing like it, no such 
splendor, no such beauty — and yet it is only 
a reflected light. So it is with the human 
heart, Mildred. The sun of individual love 
— the fierce orb of selfish passion — has sunk 
below life’s horizon, but the reflected glory 
of the Christian’s love for sinners brightens 
that horizon with a far lovelier light.” 

“ If I could feel like you — if I were as un- 
selflsh as you — ” faltered Mildred. 

“You have seen Louise Hillersdon — a 
frivolous, pleasure-loving woman, you think, 
perhaps. One who was once an abject sin- 
ner, whom 3’ou are tempted to despise. I 
have seen that woman kneeling by the bed 
of death— I have seen her ministering with 
unblenching courage to the sufferers from 
the most loathsome diseases humanity knows, 


94 


THE FATAL THREE. 


and I firmly believe that those hours of un- 
selfish love have been the brightest spots in 
her checkered life. Believe me, Mildred, 
self-sacrifice is the shortest road to happiness. 
No, I would not urge you to make your election 
hurriedly. Give yourself leisure for thought 
and prayer; and then, if you decide on devot- 
ing your life to good works, command ray 
help, my counsel — all that is mine to give.” 


“ I know — I know that I have a sure friend 
in you, and that under heaven I have no bet- 
ter friend,” she answered, quietly, glancing at 
the clock as she spoke. “I am going to 
Brighton this afternoon, to spend a few days 
with my aunt, and to — tell her wdiat has hap- 
pened. She must know all about Fay. If 
there is any room for doubt she will tell me. 
My last hope is there.” 


CHAPTER IV. 

THE RICH MISS FAUSSET. 


Miss Fausset— Madelina Fausset — occu- 
pied a large house in Lewes Crescent, with 
windows commanding all that there is of 
bold coast-line and open sea to be beheld at 
Brighton. Her windows looked eastward, 
and her large substantial mansion seemed, as 
it were, to turn its back upon all the frivoli- 
ties of the popular watering-place — upon its 
cockney visitors of summer and its Novem- 
ber smartness, its aquarium and theatre, its 
London stars and Pavilion concerts, its car- 
riages and horsemen — few of whom ever went 
so far east as Lewes Crescent; its brazen 
bands and brazen faces— upon everything ex- 
cept its church-bells, which were borne up to 
Miss Fausset’s windows by every west wind, 
and which sounded with but little intermis- 
sion from no less than three temples within 
a quarter of a mile of the Crescent. 

Happily, Miss Fausset loved the sound of 
church-bells, loved all things connected with 
her own particular church with the ardor 
which a woman who has few ties of kindred 
or friendship can afford to give to clerical 
matters. Nothing except serious indisposi- 
tion would have prevented her attending 
matins at St. Edmund’s, the picturesque and 
semi-fashionable Gothic temple in a narrow 
side street within ten minutes’ walk of the 
Crescent; nor was she often absent from af- 
ternoon prayers, which were read daily at 
five o’clock to a small and select congrega- 
tion. The somewhat stately figure of the 
elderly spinster was familiar to most of the 
congregation at St. Edmund’s. All old Brigh- 
tonians knew the history of that tall, slim 
maiden lady, richly clad after a style of her 


own, which succeeded in reconciling Puritan- 
ism with Parisian fashion, very dignified in 
her carriage and manners, with a touch of 
hauteur, as of a miserable sinner who knew 
that she belonged to the salt of the earth. 
They knew that she was Miss Fausset, sole 
survivor of the great house of Fausset & Com- 
pany, silk merchants and manufacturers, St. 
Paul’s Church-yard and Lyons; that she had 
inherited a handsome fortune from her father 
before she was thirty, that she had refused a 
good many advantageous offers, had ranked 
as a beauty, and had been much admired in 
her time, that she had occupied the house in 
Lewes Crescent for more than quarter of a 
century, and that she had taken a prominent 
part in philanthropic undertakings and cleri- 
cal matters during the greater number of 
those years. No charity bazaar was consid- 
ered in the way of success until Miss Faus- 
set had promised to hold a stall ; no new light 
in the ecclesiastical firmament of Brighton 
could be considered a veritable star until 
Miss Fausset had taken notice of him. She 
mixed in the very best Brighton society, but 
not much. She received everybody connect- 
ed with church and charitable matters. Af- 
ternoon tea in her drawing-room was consid- 
ered a privilege, and strangers were taken to 
her as to a royal personage. Her occasional 
dinners — very rare, and never large — were 
talked of as perfection in the way of din- 
ing. 

“It is easy for her to do things nicely,” 
sighed an overweighted matron, “with her 
means, and no family. She must be inor- 
dinately rich,” 


THE FATAL THREE. 


95 


“Did she come into a very large fortune 
at her father’s death?” 

“Oh, I believe old Fausset was almost a 
millionaire, and he had only a son and a 
daughter. But it is not so much the amount 
she inherited as the amount she must have 
saved. Think how she must have nursed her 
income, with her quiet way of living. Only 
four in-door servants and a coachman, no gar- 
den, and one brougham horse. She must be 
rolling in money.” 

“ She gives away a great deal.” 

“Nothing compared with what other peo- 
ple spend. Money goes a long way in chari- 
ty. Ten pounds makes a good show on a 
subscription list; but what is it in a butcher’s 
book? I dare say my three boys have spent 
as much at Oxford in the last six years as 
Miss Fausset has given in charity within the 
same time.” 

It pleased Miss Fausset to live quietly, and 
to spend very little money upon show or 
splendor of any kind. There was distinc- 
tion enough for her in the intellectual as- 
cendancy she had acquired among those 
church-going Brightonians who thought ex- 
actly as she thought. Her spacious, well-ap- 
pointed house; her experienced servants — 
cook, house -maid, lady’s-maid, and butler; 
her neat miniature brougham, and perfect 
brougham horse, realized all her desires in 
the way of comfort or luxury. Her own diet 
was of an almost ascetic simplicity, and her 
servants were on board wages; but she gave 
her visitors the best that the season or the 
fashion could suggest to a skilful cook. Even 
her afternoon tea was considered -superior to 
everybody else’s tea, and her table was pro- 
vided with daintier cakes and biscuits than 
were to be seen elsewhere. 

Her house had been decorated and fur- 
nished under her own directions, and was 
marked in all particulars by that grain of 
Puritanism which was noticeable in the lady’s 
attire. The carpets and curtains in the two 
drawing-rooms were of delicate tones of sil- 
ver gray. The furniture was French, and 
belonged to the period of the Directory, when 
the graceful lightness of the Louis Seize style 
was merging into the classicalism of the Em- 
pire. In Miss Fausset’s drawing-room there 
were none of those charming futilities which 
cumber the tables of more frivolous women. 
Here Mr. Caacellor would have found ample 


room for his hat — room for a committee meet- 
ing, or a mission service, indeed — on that 
ample expanse of silvery velvet pile, a small 
arabesque pattern in different shades of gray. 

The grand-piano was the principal feature 
of the larger joom, but it was not draped or 
disguised, sophisticated by flower -vases, or 
made glorious with plush, after the manner of 
fashionable pianos. It stood forth — a con- 
cert-grand, in unsophisticated bulk of richly 
carved rosewood, a Broadwood piano, and 
nothing more. The inner room was lined 
with book shelves, and had the air of a room 
that was meant for usefulness rather than 
hospitality. A large, old-fashioned rosewood 
secretaire — of the Directory period — occupied 
the space in front of the wide single window, 
which commanded a view of dead walls cov- 
ered with Virginia -creeper, and in the dis- 
tance a glimpse of the crocheted spire of St. 
Edmund’s, a reproduction in little of one of 
the turrets of the Sainte Chapelle. 

Two -thirds of the volumes in those tall 
bookcases were of a theological or pious 
character, the remaining third consisted of 
those standard works which everybody ought 
to read, but which only the superior few do 
read. 

Mildred had telegraphed in the morning 
to announce her visit, and she found her 
aunt’s confidential man-servant, a German 
Swiss, and her aunt’s neat little brougham 
waiting for her at the station. Miss Fausset 
herself was in the inner drawing-room ready 
to receive her niece. 

There was something in the chastened color- 
ing and perfect order of that house in Lewes 
Crescent which always chilled Mildred upon 
entering it after a long interval. It was more 
than three years since she had visited her 
aunt, and this afternoon, in the fading light 
the silver-gray drawing-rooms, looked colder 
and emptier than usual. 

Madelina Fausset came forward to receive 
her niece, and imprinted a stately kiss of wel- 
come on each cheek. 

“My dear Mildred, this has been a most 
agreeable surprise,” she said; “but I hope it 
is no family trouble that has brought you to 
me so suddenly.” 

She looked at her niece searchingly with 
her cold, gray eyes. She was a handsome 
woman still, at fifty-seven years of age. Her 
features were faultlessly regular, and the oval 


96 


THE FATAL THREE. 


of her face was nearly as perfect as it had 
been at seven - and- twenty. Her abundant 
hair was silvery gray, and worn d la Marie 
Antoinette, a style which lent dignity to her 
appearance. Her dinner-gown of dark gray 
silk fitted her tall, upright figure to perfec- 
tion, and her one ornament, an antique dia- 
mond cross, half hidden by the folds of her 
cambric fichu, was worthy of the rich Miss 
Fausset. 

“Yes, aunt, it is trouble that has brought 
me to you — very bitter trouble; but it is just 
possible that you can help me to overcome 
it. I have come to you for help, if you can 
give it.” 

“My dear child, you must know I would 
do anything in my power — ” Miss Fausset 
began, with gentle deliberation. 

“Yes, yes, I know,” Mildred answered, 
almost impatiently. “I know that you will 
be sorry for me — but you may not be able to 
do anything. It is a forlorn hope. In such 
a strait as mine one catches at any hope.” 

Her aunt’s measured accents jarred upon 
her overstrung nerves. Her grief raged 
within her like a fever, and the grave pla- 
cidity of the elder woman tortured her. 
There seemed no capacity for sympathy in 
this stately spinster, who stood and scanned 
her with coldly inquisitive eyes. 

“ Can we be quite alone for a little while, 
aunt? Are you sure of no one interrupting 
us while I am telling you my troubles?” 

“I will give an order. It is only half-past 
six, and we do not dine till eight. There is 
no reason we should be disturbed. Come 
and sit over here, Mildred, on this sofa. 
Your maid can take your hat and jacket to 
your room.” 

Stray garments lying about in those order- 
ly drawing-rooms would have been agony 
to Miss Fausset. She rang the bell, and told 
the servant to send Mrs. Greswold’s maid, 
and to take particular care that no one was 
admitted. 

“I can see nobody this evening,” she said. 
“If any one calls you will say I have my 
niece with me, and cannot be disturbed,” 

Franz, the Swiss butler, bowed with an air 
of understanding the finest shades of feeling 
in that honored mistress. He brought out a 
tea-table, and placed it conveniently near the 
sofa on which Mildred was sitting, and he 
placed upon it the neatest of salvers with 


tiny silver teapot and ivory Worcester cup 
and saucer, and bread and butter such as 
Titania herself might have eaten with an 
apricot or a chister of dewberries. Then 
he discreetly retired, and sent Louisa, who 
smelt of tea and toast already, though she 
could not have been more than ten minutes 
in the great stony basement, which would 
have accommodated a company of infantry 
just as easily as the spinster’s small estab- 
lishment. 

Louisa took the jacket and hat and her 
mistress’s keys, and withdrew to finish her 
tea, and to freely discuss the motive and 
meaning of this extraordinary journey from 
Enderby to Brighton. The general opinion 
over the house-keeper’s tea-table inclined to 
the idea that Mrs. Greswold had found a let- 
ter — a fatal and compromising letter — ad- 
dressed to her husband by some lady with 
whom he had been carrying on an intrigue 
—in all probability Mrs. Hillersdon, of River- 
dale, 

“We all know who she was before Mr. 
Hillersdon married her,” said Louisa; “and 
don’t tell me that a woman who has behaved 
like that while she was young would ever be 
really prudent. Mrs. Hillersdon must be fif- 
ty if she’s a day, but she is a handsome wom- 
an still, and who knows — she may have been 
an old flame of my master’s.” 

“That’s it,” sighed Franz, asseutingly. 
“It’s generally an old flame that does the 
mischief. Wir sind armer Schlucker." 

“And now, my dear, tell me what has 
gone wrong with you,” said Miss Fausset, 
seating herself on the capacious sofa— low, 
broad, luxurious, one of Crunden’s master- 
pieces — beside her niece. 

The heavily draped windows shut out the 
cold light in the eastern sky, and the rooms 
were growing shadowy. A small fire burned 
in the bright steel grate, and made the one 
cheerful spot in the room, touching the rich 
bindings of the books with wandering gleams 
of light. 

“Oh, it is a long story, aunt. I must be- 
gin at the beginning. I have a question to 
ask you— a question that means life or death 
to me.” 

“A question — to — ask — me?” 

Miss Fausset uttered the words slowly, 
spacing them out, one by one, in her clear, 


THE FATAL THREE. 


97 


calm voice — the voice that had spoken at 
committee meetings, and had laid down the 
law in matters charitable and ecclesiastical 
many times in that good town of Brighton. 

“ I must go back to my childhood, aunt, 
in the first place,” began Mildred, in her low, 
earnest voice, her hands clasped, her eyes 
fixed upon her aunt’s coldly correct profile, 
between her and the light of the fire, the 
wide window behind her, with the day grad- 
ually darkening after the autumnal sunset. 
The three eastward-looking window's in the 
large room beyond had a ghostly look with 
their long guipure curtains, closely drawn 
against the dying light. 

“I must go back to the time when I was 
seven years old, and my dear father,” falter- 
ingly, and with tears in her voice, “brought 
home his adopted daughter. Fay— Fay Faus- 
set, he called her. She was fourteen and I 
was only seven — but I was very fond of her 
all the same. We took to each other from 
the very beginning. When we left London 
and went to The Hook Fay went with us. I 
was ill there, and she helped to nurse me. 
She was very good to me — kinder than I 
can say — and I loved her as if she had been 
my sister. But when I got well she was sent 
away — sent to a finishing school at Brussels, 
and I never saw her again. She had only 
lived with us one short summer. Yet it 
seemed as if she and I had been together all 
my life. I missed her so sorely. I missed 
her for years afterwards.” 

“My tender-hearted Mildred,” said Miss 
Fausset, gently. “ It was like you to give 
your love to a stranger, and to be so faithful 
to her memory.” 

“ Oh, but she was not a stranger; she was 
something nearer and dearer. I could hard- 
ly have been so fond of her if there had not 
been some link between us.” 

“Nonsense, Mildred. A warm-hearted 
child will take to any one near her own age 
who is kind to her. Why should this girl 
have been anything more than an orphan, 
whom your father adopted out of the gen- 
erosity of his heart?” 

“Oh, she was something more. There 
was a mystery. Did you ever see her, aunt? 
I don’t remember your coming to Parchment 
Street or to The Hook while she was with 
us.” 

“No I was away from England that 
7 


year. I spent that summer and autumn on 
the Lake of Geneva with my friends the 
Templemores.” 

“Ah, then you knew nothing of the trou- 
ble Fay made in our home — most innocently. 
It is such a sad story, aunt. I can hardly 
bear to touch upon it, even to you, for it 
casts a shadow upon my father’s character. 
You know how I loved and honored him, 
and how it must pain me to say one word 
that reflects upon him.” 

“Yes, I know you loved him. You could 
not love him too well, Mildred. He was a 
good man — a noble - hearted, noble ■ minded 
man.” 

“And yet that one act of his, bringing poor 
Fay into liis home, brought unhappiness upon 
us all. My mother seemed set against her 
from the very first, and on her death-bed she 
told me that Fay was my father’s daughter. 
She gave me no proof — she told me nothing 
beyond that one cruel fact. Fay was the off- 
spring of hidden sin. She told me this, and 
told me to remember it all my life. Do you 
think, aunt, she was justified in this accusa- 
tion against my father?” 

“How can I tell, Mildred?” Miss Fausset 
answered, coldly. “My brother may have 
had secrets from me.” 

“But did you never hear anything— any 
hint of this mystery? Did you never know 
anything about your brother’s life in the 
years before his marriage which would serve 
as a clew ? He could hardly have cared for 
any one — been associated with any one — and 
you not hear something — ” 

“If you mean, did I ever hear that my 
brother had a mistress, I can answer, no,” re- 
plied Miss Fausset, in a very unsympathetic 
voice. “ But men do not usually allow such 
things to be known to their sisters — especial- 
ly to a younger sister, as I was by a good 
many years. He may have been — like other 
men. Few seem free from the stain of sin. 
But, however that may have been, I know 
nothing about the matter.” 

“And you do not know the secret of Fay’s 
parentage— you, my father’s only sister — his 
only surviving relation? Can you help me 
to find any one who knew more about his 
youth — any confidential friend — any one 
who can tell me whether that girl was really 
my sister?” 

“No, Mildred. I have no knowledge of 


98 


THE FATAL THREE. 


your father’s friends. They are all dead and 
gone, perhaps. But what can it matter to 
you who this girl was? She is dead. Let 
the secret of her existence die with her. It 
is wisest, most charitable to do so.” 

“Ah, you know she is dead!” cried Mil- 
dred, quickly. “Where and when did she 
die? How did you hear of her?” 

‘ ‘ From your father. She died abroad. I 
do not remember the year.” 

“Was it before my marriage?” 

“Yes, I believe so.” 

“Long before?” 

“Two or three years, perhaps. I cannot 
tell you anything precisely. The matter was 
of no moment to me.” 

‘ ‘ Oh, aunt, it is life and death to me ! She 
was my husband’s first wife. She and I — 
daughters of one father — as I, alas! can but 
believe we were — married the same man.” 

“ I never heard your husband was a wid- 
ower.” 

“No, nor did I know it until a few weeks 
ago and then, as clearly as her distress of 
mind would allow, Mildred told how the dis- 
covery had been made. 

“The evidence of a picture — a photograph, 
which may be a good or a bad likeness — is a 
small thing to go upon, Mildred,” said her 
aunt. “ I think you have been very foolish 
to make up your mind upon such evidence.” 

“Oh, but there are other facts — coinci- 
dences. And nothing would make me doubt 
the identity of the original of that photograph 
with Fay Fausset. I recognized it at the first 
glance ; and Bell, who saw it afterwards, 
knew the face immediately. There could be 
no error in that. The only question is about 
her parentage. I thought, if there were room 
for doubt in the face of my mother’s death- 
bed statement, you could help me. But it is 
all over. You were my last hope,” said Mil- 
dred, despairingly. 

She let her face sink forward upon her 
clasped hands. Only in this moment did she 
know how she had clung to the hope that her 
aunt would be able to assure her she was mis- 
taken in her theory of Fay’s parentage. 

“My dbar Mildred,” began Miss Fausset, 
after a pause, “the words you have jusj 
used — ‘death-bed statement’ — seem to mean 
something very solemn — indisputable — ir- 
revocable; but I must beg you to remember 
that your poor mother was a very weak- 


woman and a very exacting wife. She was 
offended with my brother for his adoption of 
an orphan girl. I have heard her hold forth 
about her wrongs many a time— vaguely — 
not daring to accuse him before me; but still 
I could understand the drift of her thoughts. 
She may have nursed these vague suspicions 
of hers until they seemed to her like positive 
facts, and on her death-bed, her brain enfee- 
bled by illness, she may have made direct as- 
sertions upon no other ground than those 
long-cherished suspicions and the silent jeal- 
ousies of years. I do not think, Mildred, you 
ought to take any decisive step upon the evi- 
dence of your mother’s jealousy.” 

“My mother spoke with conviction. She 
must have known something — she must have 
had some proof. But even if it were possi- 
ble she could have spoken so positively with- 
out any other ground than jealous feeling, 
there are other facts that cry aloud to me — 
evidences to which I have not shut my eyes. 
Fay must have belonged to some one, aunt,” 
pursued Mildred, with growing earnestness, 
clasping her hands upon Miss Fausset’s arm 
as they sat side by side in the gathering 
darkness. “There must have been some 
reason, and a strong one, for her presence in 
our house. My father was not a man to act 
upon caprice. I never remember any foolish 
or frivolous act of his in all the years of my 
girlhood. He was a man of thought and 
strong purpose; he did nothing without a 
motive. He would not have charged him- 
self with the care of that poor girl unless he 
had considered it his duty to protect her.” 

“Perhaps not.” 

“I am sure not. Then comes the ques- 
tion, who was she, if she was not my father’s 
daughter? He had no near relations — he had 
no bosom friend that I ever heard of — no 
friend so dear that he would deem it his 
duty to adopt that friend’s orphan child. 
There is no other clew to the mystery that I 
can imagine. Can you, aunt, suggest any 
other solution?” 

“No, Mildred, I am as ignorant as you.” 

“ If there were no other evidence within 
my knowledge, my father’s manner alone 
would have given me a clew to his secret. 
He so studiously evaded my inquiries about 
Fay — there was such a settled melancholy in 
his manner when he spoke of her.” 

“Poor John! he had a heart of .gold, Mil- 


THE FATAL THREE. 


dred. There never was a truer man than 
your father. Be sure of that, come what 
may.” 

“I have never doubted that.” 

There was a pause of some minutes after 
this. The two women sat in silence looking 
at the fire, which had burned red and hollow 
since Franz had last attended to it. Mildred 
sat with her head leaning against her aunt’s 
shoulder, her hand clasping her aunt’s hand. 
Miss Fausset sat erect as a dart, looking 
steadily at the fire, her lips compressed and 
resolute, the image of unfaltering purpose. 

“And now, Mildred,” she began at last, in 
those firm and measured accents which Mil- 
dred remembered in her childhood as an as- 
sociation of awe; “take an old woman’s ad- 
vice, and profit by an old woman’s experience 
of life if you can. Put this suspicion of 
yours on one side ; forget it as if it had nev- 
er been, and go back to your good and faith- 
ful husband. This suspicion of yours is but 
a suspicion, at most, founded on the jealous 
fancy of one of the most fanciful women I 
ever knew. Why should George Greswold’s 
life be made desolate because your mother 
was a bundle of nerves? Forget — forget all 
you have ever thought about that orphan 
girl, and go back to your duty as a wife.” 

Mildred started away from her aunt, and 
left the sofa as if she had suddenly discov- 
ered herself in contact with the Evil One. 

“Aunt, you astound, you horrify me!” she 
exclaimed. “ Can you be so false to the con- 
duct and principles of your whole life; can 
you put duty to a husband before duty to 
God? Have I not sworn to honbr him with 
all my heart, with all my strength? and if 
in this trial of ray faith the sacrifice is al- 
most more than my strength can bear, am I 
to yield to the weak counsel of my heart, 
which would put my love of the creature 
above my honor of the Creator? Would you 
counsel me to persist in an unholy union — 
you whose life has been given up to the 
service of God; you who have put his serv- 
ice far above all earthly affections ; you who 
have shown yourself so strong — can you 
counsel me to be so weak and to let my love 
— my fond true love for my dear one — con- 
quer my knowledge of the right? Who 
knows if my darling’s death may not have 
been God’s judgment upon iniquity— God’s 
judgment — ” 


She had burst into sudden tears at the 
mention of her husband’s name, with all that 
tenderness his image evolved ; but at that 
word judgment she stopped abruptly with a 
half-hysterical cry as a memory flashed back 
upon her mind. 

She remembered the afternoon of the re- 
turn to Enderby, and how her husband had 
knelt by his daughter’s grave, believing him- 
self alone, and how there had come up from 
that prostrate figure a bitter cry : 

“Judgment ! judgment 1” 

Did he know? Was that the remorseless 
ejaculation of one who knew himself a de- 
liberate sinner? 

Miss Fausset endured this storm of reproof 
without a word. She never altered her atti- 
tude or wavered in her quiet contemplation 
of the fading fire. She waited while Mildred 
paced up and down the room in a tempest 
of passionate feeling; and then she said, even 
more quietly than she had spoken before, 

“My dear Mildred, I have given you my 
advice conscientiously. If you refuse to be 
guided by the wisdom of one who is more 
than twenty years your senior, the conse- 
quences of your obstinacy must be upon 
your own head. I only know that if I had 
as good a man as George Greswold for my 
husband” — with a little catch in her voice 
that sounded almost like a sob — “it would 
take a great deal more than a suspicion to 
part me from him. And now, Mildred, if 
you mean to dress for dinner, it is time you 
went to your room.” 

In any other house, and with any other 
hostess, Mildred would have asked to be let 
off the burden of a formal dinner, and to 
spend the rest of the evening in her own 
room; but she knew her aunt’s dislike of 
any domestic irregularity, so she went away 
meekly and put on her black lace dinner- 
gown, and returned to the drawing-room at 
five minutes before eight. 

She had been absent half an hour, but it 
seemed to her as if Miss Fausset had not 
stirred since she left her. The lamps w'ere 
lighted, the fire had been made up, and the 
curtains were drawn, but the mistress of the 
house was sitting in exactly the same atti- 
tude on the sofa near the fire, erect, motion- 
less, with her thoughtful gaze fixed upon the 
burning coals in the low steel grate. 

Aunt and niece dined Ute-d-tete, ministered 


100 


THE FATAL THREE. 


to by the experienced Franz, who was thor- 
ough master of his calling. All the details 
of that quiet dinner w^ere of an elegant sim- 
plicity, but everything was perfect after its 
fashion, from the soup to the dessert, from 
the Irish damask to the old English silver — 
everything such as befitted the station of a 
lady who was often spoken of as the rich 
Miss Fausset. 

The evening passed in mournful quiet. 
Mildred played two of Mozart’s sonatas at 
her aunt’s request — sonatas which she had 
played in her girlhood before the advent of 
her first and only lover — that lover who was 
now left widowed and desolate in that time 
which should have been the golden after- 
noon of life. As her fingers played those 
familiar movements her mind was at Ender- 
by with the husband she had deserted. How 
was he bearing his solitude, she w^ondered? 
Would he shut his heart against her in an- 
ger, teach himself to live his life without 
her? She pictured him in his accustomed 
corner of the drawing-room, with his lamp- 
lit table and pile of books and papers, and 
Pamela seated on the other side of the room, 
and the dogs lying on the hearth, and the 
room all aglow with flowers in the subdued 
light of the shaded lamps ; so different from 
these cold and colorless rooms of Miss Faus- 
set’s, with their look as of vaulted halls in 
which voices echo with hollow reverbera- 
tions in empty space. 

And then she thought of her own desolate 
life, and wondered what it was to be. She 
felt as if she had no strength of mind to 
chalk out a path for herself — to create for 
herself a mission. That sublime idea of liv- 
ing for others, of a life devoted to flnding 
the lost ones of Israel, or nursing the sick, 
or teaching little children the way of right- 
eousness, left her cold. Her thoughts dwelt 
persistently upon her own loves, her own 
losses, her own ideal of happiness. 

“ I am of the earth, earthy,” she told her- 
self, despairingly, as her Angers lingered over 
the adagio. “ If I were like Clement Can- 
celler my grief would be easier to bear; my 
own individual sorrow would seem as noth- 
ing compared with that vast sum of human 
suffering which he is always trying to les- 
sen.” 

‘ ‘ May I ask what your plans are for the 
future, Mildred?” said Miss Fausset, laying 


aside a memoir of Bishop Selwyn which she 
had been reading while her niece played. 
“ I need hardly tell you that I shall be 
pleased to have you here as long as you care 
to stay ; but I should like to know your 
scheme of life, in the event of your persist- 
ence in a separation from your husband?” 

“ I have made no definite plan, aunt, I 
shall spend the autumn in some quiet place 
on the Rhine, and perhaps go on to Italy for 
the winter.” 

“Why to Italy?” 

“It is the dream of my life to see that 
country, and my husband always refused to 
take me there.” 

“ For some good reason, no doubt.” 

“ I believe he had a nervous dread of fever. 
I know of no other reason.” 

“You are prompt to take advantage of 
your independence.” 

“Indeed, aunt, I have no idea of that kind. 
God help me! my independence is a sorry 
privilege. But if any country could offer 
distraction of mind to me, that country would 
be Italy.” 

“And after the winter? Do you mean to 
live abroad altogether?” 

“I don’t know what I may do. I have 
thoughts of entering a sisterhood by-and-by.” 

“ Well, you must follow your own course, 
Mildred. I can say no more than I have said 
already. If you make up your mind to leave 
the world, there are sisterhoods all over 
England, and there is plenty of good work 
to be done. Perhaps, after all, it is the best 
life, and that those are happiest who shut 
their minds against earthly affections.” 

“As you have done, aunt,” said Mildred, 
with respect. “I know how full of good 
works your life has been.” 

“ I have tried to do my duty according to 
my lights,” answered the spinster, gravely. 

The next day was cold and stormy — 
autumn with the foretaste of winter. Mil- 
dred went to the morning service with her 
aunt in the bright new Gothic church w'hich 
Miss Fausset’s liberality had helped to cre- 
ate— a picturesque temple, with clustered col- 
umns and richly floriated capitals, diapered 
roof, and shining pavement, and over all 
things the glow of many-colored lights from 
painted windows. Miss Fausset spent the 
morning in visiting among the poor. She 
had a large district out in the London road. 


THE FAT AL^ THREE. 


101 


in a part of Brighton of which the fashion- 
able Brightonian hardly knoweth the exist- 
ence. 

Mildred sat in the back drawing-room all 
the morning pretending to read. She took 
volume after volume out of the bookcase, 
turned over the leaves, or sat staring at a 
page for a quarter of an hour at a time in 
hopeless vacuity of mind. She had brooded 
upon her trouble until her intellect seemed 
benumbed, and nothing was left of that 
sharp sorrow but a dull, aching pain. 

After luncheon she went out for a solitary 
walk on the cliff road towards Rottingdean. 
It was a relief to find herself alone upon that 
barren down, with the great stormy sea in 
front of her, and all the busy world left be- 
hind. She walked all the way to Rotting- 
dean, rejoicing in her solitude, dreading the 
return to the stately French gray drawing- 
room and her aunt’s society. Looking down 
at the shabby little village nestling in the 
hollow of the hills, it seemed to her that she 
might hide her sorrows almost as well in that 
quiet nook as in Rhineland; and it seemed 
to her also that this place of all others was 
best fitted for the establishment of any chari- 
table foundation in a small way — for a home 
for the aged poor, for instance, or for a cra- 
dle for orphan children. Her own fortune 
would amply sufiSce for any such modest 
foundation. The means were at her dis- 
posal. Only the will was wanting. 

It was growing dusk when she went back 
to Lewes Crescent, so she went straight to 
her room and dressed for dinner before go- 
ing to the drawing-room. The wind, with its 
odor of the sea, had refreshed her. She felt 
less depressed, better able to face a life-long 
sorrow than before she went out, but physi- 
cally she was exhausted by the six-mile walk, 
and she looked pale as ashes in her black lace 
gown, with its evening bodice, showing the 
alabaster throat and a large black enamel 
locket set with a monogram in diamonds — 
L. G. (Laura Greswold). 

She entered by the door of the inner room. 
Her aunt was not there, and there was only 
one large reading-lamp burning on a table 
near the fire. The front drawing-room was 
all in shadow. She went towards the piano, 
intending to play to hereelf in the twilight, 
but as she moved slowly in the direction of 
the instrument, which stood between the tall 


guipure-shaded windows, and in dense shad- 
ow, a strong hand played a modulation of 
Sebastian Bach’s — a chain of slow and sol- 
emn chords that faded in a pianissimo rallen- 
tando. 

The hands that played those chords were 
the hands of a master. It was hardly a sur- 
prise to Mildred when a tall figure rose from 
the piano, and Cesare Castellani stood before 
her in the dim light. 

His hat and gloves were upon the piano, 
as if he had just entered the room. 

“My dear Mrs. Greswold, what a delight- 
ful surprise to find you here! I had made a 
late call upon your aunt — she is always in- 
dulgent to my bohemian indifference to eti- 
quette — and had not the least idea that I 
should see you.” 

“I did not know that you and my aunt 
were friends. ” 

“No?” interrogatively. “That is very 
odd, for we are quite old friends. Miss Faus- 
set was all goodness to me when I was an idle 
undergraduate at Magdalen.” 

“Yet when you came to Enderby you 
brought an introduction from Mrs. Tomki- 
son. Surely my aunt would have been a bet- 
I ter person—” 

I “No doubt; but it is just like me to take 
the first sponsor who came to hand. When 
! I am in London I half live at Mrs. Tomki- 
son’s, and I had heard her rave about you 
until I became feverishly anxious to make 
your acquaintance. I ought perhaps to have 
; referred to Miss Fausset for my credentials 
j — but I am volage by nature; and then I knew 
; Mrs. Tomkison would exaggerate my virtues 
I and ignore my errors.” 

I Mildred went back to the inner room, and 
seated herself by the reading-lamp. Castel- 
lani followed her, and placed himself on the 
I other side of the small octagon table, leaving 
only a narrow space between them. 

“How pale yoii are!” he said, with a look 
of concern. “ I hope you are not ill.” 

“No, I am only tired after a very long 
walk.” 

“I had no idea you had left Enderby.” 

“Indeed!” 

“You said riothing of your intention of 
leaving the neighborhood the day before yes- 
terday.” 

“There was no occasion to talk of my 
plans,” Mildred answered, coldly. “We were 


102 


THE FATAL THREE. 


all too busy and too anxious about the con- 
cert to think of any other matter. ” 

“Did you leave soon after the concert?” 

“ The same evening. I did not know you 
were leaving Riverdale.” 

‘ ‘ Oh, I only stayed for the concert. I had 
protracted my visit unconscionably, but Mrs. 
Hillersdon was good enough not to seem tired 
of me. I am in nobody’s way, and I con- 
trived to please her with my music. Did 
you not find her delightfully artistic?” 

‘ ‘ I thought her manners charming ; and 
she seems fond of music, if that is what you 
mean by being artistic.” 

“ Oh, I mean worlds more than that. Mrs. 
Hillersdon is artistic to her fingers’ ends. In 
everything she does one feels the artist. Her 
dress, her air, her way of ordering a dinner 
or arranging a room; her feeling for litera- 
ture — she never reads; her feeling for form 
and color — she cannot draw a line — in a word, 
her personality is the very essence of modern 
art. She is as a woman what Ruskin is as a 
man. Is Miss Ransome with you?” 

“No, I have left her to keep house for 
me.” 

It seemed a futile thing to make believe 
that all was well at Enderby, to ward off ex- 
planations, when before long the world must 
know that George Greswold and his wife 
were parted forever. Some reason would 
have to be given. That thirst for informa- 
tion about the inner life of one’s neighbors 
which is the ruling passion of this waning 
century must be slaked somehow. It was 
partly on this account, perhaps, that Mildred 
fancied it would be a good thing for her to 
enter a sisterhood. The curious could be 
satisfied then. It would be said that Mrs. 
Greswold had given up the world. 

“ She is a very sweet girl,” said Castellani, 
thoughtfully; “pretty, too, a delicious com- 
j^exion, hair that suggests Sobrina’s after a 
visit from the hair-dresser, a delightful figure, 
and very nice manners — but she leaves me as 
cold as ice. Why is it that only a few wom- 
en in the world have the true magnetic pow- 
er? They are so few, and their influence is 
so stupendous! Think of the multitude of 
women of all nations, colors, and languages 
that go to finish one Cleopatra or one Mary 
Stuart!” 

Miss Fausset came into the room while he 
was talking, and was surprised at seeing him 


in such easy yet earnest conversation with 
her niece. 

“One would suppose you had known each 
other for years,” she said, as she shook hands 
with Castellani, and looked from one to the 
other. 

“And so we have,” he answered, gayly; 
“ in some lives weeks mean years. I some- 
times catch myself wondering what the world 
was like before I knew Mrs. Greswold.” 

“ How long have you known her — without 
rodomontade?” 

“For about a month, aunt,” replied Mil- 
dred. “I have been asking Mr. Castellani 
why he came to me with an introduction 
from my friend, Mrs. Tomkison, when it 
would have been more natural to present him- 
self as a friend of yours.” 

“ Oh, he has always a motive for what he 
does,” Miss Fausset said, coldly. “You will 
stay to dinner, of course,” she added, to Cas- 
tellani. 

“I am free for this evening, and I should 
like to stay, but I am not dressed for din- 
ner.” 

“I am used to irregularities from you. 
Give Mrs. Greswold your arm.” 

Franz was at the door announcing the 
evening meal, and presently Mildred found 
herself seated at the snug round table in the 
sombre spacious dining-room — a room with 
a bayed front, commanding an illimitable 
extent of sea — with her aunt upon one side 
of her and Cesare Castellani on the other. 
The meal was livelier than the dinner of last 
night. Castellani appeared quite uncon- 
scious that Mildred was out of spirits. He 
was full of life and gayety, and had an air 
of happiness which was almost contagious. 
His conversation was purely intellectual, 
ranging through the w^orld of mind and of 
fancy, scarcely touching things earthly and 
human, and thus h,e struck no jarring chord, 
evolved no sudden pang of pain in Mildred’s 
weary heart. So far as she could be dis- 
tracted from the ever-present thought of loss 
and sorrow, his conversation served to dis- 
tract her. 

He went up to the drawing-room with the 
two ladies, and at Miss Fausset’s request sat 
j down at once to the piano. The larger room 
I was still in shadow, the smaller bright with 
I fire and lamplight. 

1 He played as only the gifted few can 


THE FATAL THREE, 


play, played as one in whom music is a sixth 
sense, but to-night his music was new to Mil- 
dred. He played none of those classic num- 
bers which had been familiar to her since 
the days of her girlhood — no tender melody 
of Mozart’s, no swelling grandeur of Beetho- 
ven’s colossal muse, no graceful strain of Men- 
delssohn’s, or passionate wail of Chopin’s. 
His music to-night was full of airy caprices, 
quips, and cranks, and wreathed smiles. It 
was operatic music, of the stage stagey; a 
music which seemed on a level with Watteau 
or Tissot in the sister art — gay to audacity 
and sentimental to affectation. It was charm- 
ing music all the same — charged with melody, 
gracious, capricious, uncertain, like the smiles 
of an April day. 

Whatever it was, every movement was fa- 
miliar to Miss Fausset. She sat with her 
long ivory knitting-needles at rest on her lap, 
sat in a dreamy attitude, gazing at the fire, 
and listening intently. Some melodies seemed 
to touch her almost to tears. The love of 
music ran in the Fausset family, and it was 
no surprise to Mildred to see her aunt so ab- 
sorbed. What had an elderly spinster to live 
for if it were not philanthropy and art? And 
for the plastic arts — for pictures and porce- 
lain, statuary or high -art furniture. Miss 
Fausset cared not a jot, as those cold and 
barren drawing - rooms, with their empty 
walls and pallid color, bore witness. Music 
she loved with a most unaffected devotion, 
and it was in nowise strange to find her the 
friend and patroness of Cesare Castellani, op- 
posite as were the opinions of .the man who 
wrote “ Nepenthe ” and the woman who had 
helped to found the church of St. Edmund 
the Confessor. 

“Play the duet at the end of the second 
act,” she said, when he paused, after a brill- 
iant six-eight movement which suggested a 
joyous chorus and the tripping of rustic feet 
in May-pole or morris dance. 

He played a cantabile accompaniment, like 
the flow of summer seas, and then a plaintive 
melody for two voices — following, answering, 
echoing each other with tearful emphasis — a 
broken phrase here and there, as if the singer 
were choked by a despairing sob. 

“What is the name of the opera, aunt?” 
asked Mildred; “I never heard any of that 
music before.” 

‘ ‘ lie has been playing selections from dif- 


103 

ferent operas. That last melody is a duet in 
an opera called ‘ La Dona del Pittore, ’ ” 

“By what composer? It sounded like 
Flotow.” 

“ It is not Flotow’s. That opera was writ- 
ten by Mr. Castellani’s father.” 

“I remember he told me his father had 
written operas. It is a pity his music was 
never known in England.” 

“You had better say it was a pity his 
music was never fashionable in Paris, Had 
it been recognized there, English connoisseurs 
would have speedily discovered its merits. 
We are not a musical nation, Mildred. We 
find new planets, but we never, discover new 
musicians. We took up Weber only to neg- 
lect him, and break his heart. We had not 
taste enough to understand that Mendles- 
sohn’s ‘ St. Paul ’ was not unworthy of the 
composer of ‘ Elijah.’” 

“Mr. Castellani’s operas were popular in 
Italy, were they not?” 

“For a time, yes; but the Italians are as 
capricious as we are dull. Cesare tells me 
that his father’s operas have not held the 
stage.” 

“Were they fashionable in your time, 
aunt, when you were studying music at 
Milan?” 

“Yes, they were often performed at that 
time. I used to hear them occasionally.” 

“And you like them now. They are as- 
sociated with your girlhood. I can under- 
stand that they must have a particular charm 
for you.” 

“Yes, they are full of old memories.” 

“Do you never play or sing yourself, 
aunt?” 

“ Sometimes, when I am quite alone.” 

“But never to give pleasure to other peo- 
ple? That seems unkind. I remember how 
proud my father was of your musical talent; 
but you would never let us hear you, either 
at The Hook or in Parchment Street.” » 

“ I have never cared to play or sing before 
an audience since I was a girl. You need 
not wonder at me, Mildred. Different peo- 
ple have different ways of thinking. My 
pleasure in music of late years has been the 
pleasure of a listener. Mr. Castellani is good 
enough to gratify me sometimes, as he has 
done to-night, when he has nothing better 
to do.” 

“ Do not say that,” exclaimed Castellani, 


104 


THE FATAL THREE. 


coming into the glow of the hearth, and 
seating himself beside Miss Fausset’s high- 
backed arm-chair. “What can I have bet- 
ter to do than to commune with a sym- 
pathetic mind like yours in the language 


of the dead? It is almost as if my father’s 
voice were speaking to you,” he said, in ca- 
ressing tones, bending down to kiss the thin 
pale hand which lay idle on the arm of the 
chair. 


CHAPTER V. 

A DARK OUTLOOK. 


George Greswold was not the kind of 
man to sit down in idle submission to fate 
under a great wrong or under a great loss. 
A feeling of blank despair had come upon 
him after his interview with Mrs. Bell, in the 
solitude of those deserted rooms where every 
object spoke to him of his Mufe’s absence — 
where the influence of her mind and fancy 
was a part of the very atmosphere ; so much 
so that in spite of her farewell letter in his 
breast-pocket he started every now and then 
from his reverie, fancying he heard her foot- 
step in the corridor, or her voice in an adjoin- 
ing room. 

His conversation with Bell had brought 
him little comfort, but it had not convinced 
him of the evil in which his wife so firmly 
believed. There was little doubt in his mind 
that the woman he had married eighteen 
years ago was identical with Mildred’s young 
companion and J ohn Fausset’s protegee. But 
whether that mysterious protegee had been 
John Fausset’s daughter was a question still 
open to doubt. The suspicions of a jealous 
wife, the opinions of the servants’ hall, were 
not sufficient for certainty. 

On the other hand, the weight of evidence 
leaned all to that one solution of the mystery 
in Mr. Fausset’s conduct. That a man should 
charge himself with the care of a child of 
whose parentage and belongings he could 
give no satisfactory account — about whom, 
indeed, he seemed to have given no account 
at all — was a strange thing. Stranger still 
was his conduct in bringing that child into 
his own family, to the hazard of his domestic 
peace. Stranger even yet that he should have 
gone down to the grave without giving his 
beloved daughter any explanation of his con- 
duct from first to last— that he should have 
left the story of his protegee as dark at the end 
as it had been at the beginning. 


Painfully conjuring back to life the phan- 
tom forms of a miserable past, George Gres- 
wold recalled the few facts which he had 
ever known of his first wife’s history. She 
was an orphan, without relations or friends. 
At eighteen years of age she had been trans- 
ferred from a finishing-school at Brussels to 
the care of an English artist and his wife, 
called Mortimer — middle-aged people, the 
husband with a small talent, the wife with a 
small income, both of which went farther in 
Brussels than they would have gone in Eng- 
land. They had an apartment on one of the 
new boulevards of Brussels and a summer 
retreat in the Ardennes. When the artist 
and his wife travelled, Vivien went with 
them, and it was on one of these occasions 
that George Greswold met her at Milan. Mr. 
Mortimer had let his apartment for the win- 
ter, and had established himself in the Italian 
city, where he worked assiduously at a classic 
style of art which nobody ever seemed to 
buy, though a good many people pretended 
to admire. 

Vivien Faux. It sounded like a nom de 
fantaisie. She told him that-she was nobody, 
and that she belonged to nobody. She had 
no home, no people, no surroundings, no his- 
tory, no associations. She had been educated 
at an expensive school, and her clothes had 
been made at a fashionable mantua-maker’s 
in the Rue Montague de la Cour. Every- 
thing that a school-girl’s fancy could desire 
had been provided for her. 

“ So far as such things go, I was as well off 
as the most fortunate of my companions,” 
she told him; “but I was a friendless waif 
all the same, and my school-fellows despised 
me. I drank the cup of scorn to the dregs.” 

Seeing how painful this idea of her isola- 
tion was to her, George Greswold had been 
I careful to avoid all questioning that might 


THE FATAL THREE. 


105 


gall the open wound. In truth, he had no 
keen curiosity about her past existence. He 
had taken her for what she was — interesting, 
clever, and in great need of a faithful pro- 
tector. It was enough for him to know that 
she had been educated as a lady, and that 
her character was spotless. His marriage 
had been one of those unions which are of 
all unions the most fatal — a marriage for 
pity. A marriage for money, for self-inter- 
est, ambition, family pride, may result hap- 
pily. Time and circumstance may mould it 
into a loving union; but in a marriage for 
pity the chain galls on both sides— galls and 
drags with the leaden weight that means a 
life-long despair. 

Of his wife’s resources, all George Gres- 
wold knew was that she had a life interest in 
thirty thousand pounds invested in consols. 
The dividends were sent her half-yearly by 
a firm of solicitors, Messrs. Pergament & 
Pergament, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She 
had received a letter from the firm a week 
before her last birthday, which was her twen- 
ty-first, informing her of her life interest in 
this sum, over which she would have no dis- 
posing power, nor the power to anticipate 
any portion of the income. The half-yearly 
dividends, she was informed, would in future 
be sent directly to her at any address she 
might appoint, and her signature would be a 
sufllcient receipt for each payment. 

In acknowledging this communication she 
begged to be informed from whom she had 
inherited this money, or whether it was the 
gift of a living benefactor, and whether the 
benefactor was a relative. The reply from 
Messrs. Pergament & Pergament was cold 
and formal. They regretted their inability 
to give her any information as to the source 
of her income. They were pledged to ab- 
solute silence upon this point. In any other 
matter they would be most happy to be of 
service to her. 

George Greswold had married without a 
settlement. The then state of the law, and 
the conditions of his wife’s income, made her 
independent of any husband whatever. He 
could not forestall, or rob her of, an income 
of which the capital was in the custody of 
other people, and over which she had no dis- 
posing power. He was a poor man himself 
at the time, living upon an allowance made 
him by his mother, eked out by the labor of 


his pen as a political and philosophical writer; 
but he had the expectation of the Enderby 
estate, an expectation which was all but cer- 
tainty. One fact alone was known to him 
of his wife’s surroundings which might help 
him to discover her history, and that was the 
name of the firm in Lincoln’s Inn, Messrs. 
Pergament & Pergament, and to them he 
made up his mind to apply without loss of 
time. 

He went to London on the day after Mil- 
dred’s journey to Brighton, taking Pamela and 
her dog with him to the hotel near Hanover 
Square where he sometimes put up. Pamela 
had been much disturbed by Mildred’s letter, 
and was full of wonderment, but very sub- 
missive, and ready to do anything she was 
told. 

“ I don’t want to be inquisitive or trouble- 
some, uncle, ” she said, as they sat opposite 
each other in the train, “ but I am sure there 
is something wrong.” 

“Yes, Pamela, there is something wrong, 
but it is something which will come right 
again in good time, I hope. All we can do 
is to be patient.” 

His look of quiet pain, and the haggard 
lines which told of sleepless nights and brood- 
ing thoughts, touched Pamela’s tender heart, 
but she was wise enough to know that a sor- 
row big enough to part husband and wife is 
not a sorrow to be intruded upon lightly. 

Mr. Greswold drove with his niece to the 
hotel, established her there with her maid and 
her terrier in a private sitting-room, and pro- 
vided her with the indispensable cup of tea 
which the feminine traveller requires on ar- 
riving anywhere at any hour. 

This duty done, he left mistress, maid, and 
dog to their own devices, and started for Lin- 
coln’s Inn Fields in a hansom. 

Messrs. Pergaments’ office had a solid and 
old-established air, as of an office that had 
only to do with clients of wealth and respect- 
ability. The clerks in the outer room seemed 
to have grown old on the premises. 

“I should like to see the senior member 
of the firm if he is at liberty, ’’said Mr. Gres- 
wold. 

“Mr. Champion Pergament is at Wies- 
baden. He is a very old gentleman, and sel- 
dom comes to the office.” 

“The next partner, then—” 

“Mr. Danvers Pergament is at his place in 


106 


THE FATAL THREE. 


Yorkshire. ' If you would like to see his son, 
Mr. Danvers, Jr. — ” 

“Yes, yes, he will do if there is no one 
else.” 

“There is Mr. Maltby. The firm is now 
Pergament, Pergament & Maltby. ” 

“ Let me see Mr. Danvers Pergament, if 
you please. I don’t want to talk to a new 
man.” 

“ Mr. Maltby was articled to us seventeen 
years ago, sir, and has been in the firm ever 
since, but I believe Mr. Pergament is disen- 
gaged. Shall I take him your card?” 

George Greswold sent in his card, and was 
promptly admitted. 

He was received in a handsome office by 
a bald-headed gentleman of about five-and- 
forty, who smiled upon him blandly from a 
bac^round of oak wainscot and crimson 
cloth window-curtains. 

“Pray be seated, Mr. Greswold,” he said, 
with the visitor’s card in his hand, and look- 
ing from the card to the visitor. 

“Does my name tell you anything about 
me, Mr. Pergament?” asked Greswold, very 
gravely. 

“George Ransome Greswold,” read Mr. 
Pergament, slowly; “ the name of Greswold 
is unfamiliar to me.” 

‘ ‘ But not that of Ransome. Sixteen years 
ago my name was George Ransome. I as- 
sumed the name of Greswold on my mother’s 
death.” 

The solicitor looked at him with renewed 
attention, as if there were something to star- 
tle his professional equanimity in the former 
name. 

“You remember the name of Ransome?” 
said Greswold, interrogatively. 

“Yes, it recalls certain events. Very sad 
circumstances connected with a lady who 
was our client. You would not wish me to 
go over that ground, I am sure, Mr. Gres- 
wold?” 

“No, there is no occasion to do that. I 
hope you believe that I was blameless— or as 
far free from blame as any man can be in his 
domestic conduct — in the matter to which 
you have alluded?” 

“I have no reason to suppose otherwise.,. 
I have never been on the scene of the event. 
I knew nothing of it until nearly a year after 
it happened, and then my sources of informa- 
tion were of the slenderest. Pray be assured 


that I do not wish to say one word that can 
be offensive to you ; I would only ask you to 
consider me as a totally uninformed person. 
I have no charge to make — upon anybody’s 
account. I have no questions to ask. The 
past is dead and forgotten, so far as I and my 
firm are concerned. ” 

“Mr. Pergament, for me the past is still 
living, and it is exercising the most baneful 
influence over my present existence. It may 
blight my future. You perhaps may help to 
extricate me from a labyrinth of perplexit}'. 
I want to know who my first wife was. 
What was the real name of the young lady 
who called herself Vivien Faux, and whom 
I married under that name before the British 
Consul at Florence. Who were her parents ?” 

“ I cannot tell you.” 

“Do you mean that you cannot — or that 
you will not?” 

“I mean both. I do not know that un- 
fortunate lady’s parentage. I have no posi- 
tive knowledge on the subject, though I may 
have my own theories. I know that certain 
persons were interested in the young lady’s 
welfare, and that certain funds were placed 
in our care for her maintenance. After her 
death the capital for which we had been trus- 
tees reverted to those persons. That is the 
sum total of the lady’s history so far as we 
are acquainted with it.” 

“ Will you tell me the name of the person 
who gave my wife her fortune, who placed 
her at the school at Brussels, by whose in- 
structions she was transferred to the care of 
Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer? I want to know 
that man’s name, for that man must have 
been her father.” 

“When my father and I undertook that 
business for our client, we pledged ourselves 
to absolute secrecy. The facts of the case 
are not known even to the other members of 
the firm. The person in question was our 
client, and the secret w'as lodged with us. 
There is not a priest of the Church of Rome 
who holds the secrets of the confessional one 
whit more sacred than we hold that secret.” 

“Even if by keeping it you bligh^^and ruin 
an innocent man’s life?” 

“I cannot imagine any such consequence 
of our inevitable silence.” 

“You cannot? No, fact is stranger than 
any man’s imagination. Do you happen to 
I know the name of my second wife?” 


THE FATAL THREE. 


107 


‘ ‘ I did not even know that yoil had married 
again. You were known to our firm as Mr. 
Ransome. We lost sight of you when you 
changed your name to Greswold.” 

“I have been married, happily married, 
for fourteen years, and the name of my wife 
was Fausset, Mildred Fausset, daughter of 
John Fausset, your client.” 

Mr. Pergament had taken up a penknife 
in an absent-minded manner and was trifling 
with a very well-kept finger-nail, a fine speci- 
men of the filbert tribe, with his eyelids low- 
ered in an imperturbable thoughtfulness, as 
of a man who was rock. But, cool as he 
was, George Greswold noticed that at the 
name of Fausset the penknife gave a little 
jerk, and that the outskirts of the filbert were 
in momentary danger. Mr. Pergament was 
too wary to look up, however. He sat placid, 
attentive, with fat eyelids lowered over wash- 
ed-out gray eyes. Mr. Pergament at five-and- 
forty was still in the chrysalis or money- 
making stage, and worked hard nearly all 
the year round. His father, at sixty -nine, 
was on the Yorkshire moors, pretending to 
shoot grouse and just beginning to enjoy the 
butterfly existence of a man who had made 
his fortune. 

“Vivien Faux. Does not that sound to 
your ear like an assumed name, Mr. Perga- 
ment?” pursued Greswold. “Faux. The 
first three letters are the same as in Fausset.” 

And then George Greswold told the solici- 
tor how his second wife had recognized his 
first wife’s photograph as the likeness of a 
girl whom she believed to have been her half- 
sister, and how this fact threatened to divide 
husband and wife forever. 

“Surely Mrs. Greswold cannot be one of 
those bigoted persons who pin their faith 
upon a prohibition of the canon law as if it 
were the teaching of Christ — a prohibition 
which the Roman Church was always ready 
to cancel in favor of its faithful and elect,” 
said the lawyer. 

“ Unhappily, my wife was taught in a very 
rigid school of divinity. She would perish 
rather than violate a principle.” 

“ But if your first wife were John Faus- 
set’s natural daughter— what then? The law 
does not recognize such affinities.” 

“No, but the Church does. The Roman 
Church could create a prohibitive affinity in 
the case of a cast-ofif mistress; and it is the 


privilege of our Anglican theology in its 
highest development to adopt the most re- 
condite theories of Rome. For God’s sake 
be plain with me, Mr. Pergament. Was the 
girl who called herself Vivien Faux John 
Fausset’s daughter, or was she not?” 

“ I regret that I cannot answer your ques- 
tion. My promise to my client was of the 
nature of an oath. I cannot violate that 
promise upon any consideration whatever. 
I must ask you, Mr. Greswold, as a gentle- 
man, not to urge the matter any further.” 

“I submit,” said Greswold, hopelessly. 
“If it is a point of honor with you I can 
say no more. ” 

Mr. Pergament accompanied him to the 
threshold of the outer office, and the elderly 
clerk ushered him to the wide old landing- 
place beyond. The lawyer had been courte- 
ous, but not cordial. There was a shade of 
distrustfulness, or even suspicion, in his man- 
ner, and he had pretended to no sympathy 
with Mr. Greswold in his difficulties; but 
George Greswold felt that among those who 
knew the history of his former marriage 
there was not much likelihood of friendly 
feeling towards him. To them he was a man 
outside the pale. 

He left the office sick at heart. This had 
been his only means of coming at the knowl- 
edge of his first wife’s parentage, and this 
means had failed him utterly. The surprise 
indicated b3’' that slight movement of the 
lawyer’s hand at the first mention of John 
Fausset’s name went far to convince him 
that Mildred’s conviction was based on truth. 
Yet if John Fausset were Mr. Pergament’s 
client, it was very odd that Mr. Pergament 
should be ignorant of the circumstances of 
Mildred’s marriage, and the name and sur- 
roundings of her husband. Odd, assuredly, 
but not impossible. On reflection it seemed, 
indeed, natural enough that Mr. Fausset 
should confide his secret to a stranger, and 
establish a trust with a stranger, rather than 
admit his family lawyer to his confidence. 
This provision for an illegitimate daughter 
would be an isolated transaction in his life. 
He would select a firm of approved respect- 
ability, who were unconcerned with his fam- 
ily affairs, with whom there was no possibil- 
ity of his wife or daughter being brought 
into contact. 

George Greswold drove from Lincoln’s Inn 


108 


THE FATAL THREE. 


to Queen Anne’s Gate, where he spent ten 
minutes with Mrs. Tomkison, and learned 
all that lady could tell him about his wife’s 
movements, how she had had a long inter- 
view with Mr. Canceller before she started 
for Brighton, and how she was looking very 
ill and very unhappy. Provided with this 
small stock of information, he went back to 
the hotel and dined teie-d-tete with Pamela, 
who had the good-sense not to talk to him, 
and who devoted all her attentions to the 
scion of Brockenhurst Joe. 

When the waiters had left the room for 
good, and uncle and niece were alone over 
their coffee, Mr. Greswold became more com- 
municative. 

‘ ‘ Pamela, you are a good, warm-hearted 
girl, and I believe you would go some way 
to serve me,” he said, quietly, as he sat look- 
ing at Box, who had folded his delicately 
pencilled legs in a graceful attitude upon the 
steel bar of the fender, and was blinking at 
the fire. 

“ My dear uncle, I would cut off my head 
for you — ” 

“ I don’t quite want that, but I want your 
loyal and loving help in the saddest period 
of my life— yes, the saddest; sadder even 
than the sorrow of last year ; and yet I 
thought the pain of that was unsurpassable.” 

“ Poor uncle George !” sighed Pamela, 
bending over the table to take his hand, and 
clasping it fondly. “ Command me in any- 
thing — you know how fond I have always 
been of you— almost fonder than of my poor 
father. Perhaps,” she added, gravely, “ it is 
because I always respected you more than I 
did him.” 

“ I cannot confide in you wholly, Pamela 
— not yet ; but I may tell you this much : 
Something has happened to part my wife and 
me — perhaps for life. It is her wish, not 
mine, that we should live the rest of our lives 
apart. There has been no wrong-doing on 
either side, mark you. There is no blame, 
there has been no angry feeling, there is no 
falling off in love. We are both the inno- 
cent victims of an intolerable fatality. I 
would willingly struggle against my doom, 
defy the Fates; but my wife has another 
way of thinking, and she makes her own 
life desolate and condemns me to a life-long 
desolation. 

“She is now at Brighton with her aunt, 


Miss Fausset. I am going there to-morrow 
morning — to see her, if she will let me — per- 
haps for the last time. I want to take you 
with me, and if Mildred carries out her in- 
tention of spending the winter abroad, I 
want you to go with her as her companion 
and adopted daughter. I want you to wind 
yourself into her confidence and into her 
heart, to cheer and comfort her, and to be a 
shield between her and the malice of the 
world. Her position will be at best a pain- 
ful one — a wife and no wife — separated from 
her husband for a reason which she will 
hardly care to blazon to the world, perhaps 
will hardly confide to her nearest and dear- 
est friend.” 

“ I will do anything you tell me, uncle; go 
anywhere; to the end of the world, if you 
wanted me. You know how fond I am of 
Aunt Mildred. I think I am fonder of her 
even than of my sister, who is so wrapped 
up in that dreadful baby that she is some- 
times unendurable. But it seems so awfully 
strange that you and aunt should be parted,” 
continued Pamela, with a puzzled brow. “ I 
can’t make it out one little bit. I — I — don’t 
want to ask questions. Uncle George — at 
least only just one question — has all this 
mysterious trouble anything to do with Mr. 
Castellani?” 

She turned crimson as she pronounced the 
name, but Greswold was too absorbed to no- 
tice her embarrassment. 

“With Castellani? No. How should it 
concern him?” he exclaimed ; and then re- 
membering the beginning of evil, he added, 
“Mr. Castellani has nothing to do with our 
difficulty, in a direct manner; but indirectly 
his presence at Enderby was at the root of 
the mischief.” 

“ Oh, uncle, you were not jealous of him, 
surely?” 

“Jealous of him? I jealous of Castellani 
or any man living? You must know very 
little of my wife or of me, Pamela, when 
you can ask such a question.” 

“ No, no; of course not. It was absurd of 
me to suggest such a thing, when I knew 
how my aunt adores you,” Pamela said, has- 
tily; but in spite of this disavowal she was 
lying awake half through the night torment- 
ing herself with all manner of speculations 
and wild imaginings as 'to the cause of the 
separation between George Greswold and 


THE FATAL THREE. 


109 


his wife, and Cesare Castellani’s connection 
with it. 

She went to Brighton with her uncle next 
day. Box and the maid accompanying them 
in a second-class compartment. They put 
up at a hotel upon the east cliff, which was 
quieter and more exclusive than the cara- 
vanseries towards the setting sun, and con- 
veniently near Lewes Crescent. 

“Shall I go with you at once, uncle?” ask- 
ed Pamela, as Mr. Greswold was leaving the 
house. ‘ ‘ I hope Miss Fausset is not a stern old 
thing who will freeze me with a single look.” 

“ She is not so bad as that, but I will break 
the ice for you. I am going to see my wife 
alone before I take you to Lewes Crescent. 
You can go on the Madeira walk with Peter- 
son, and give Box an airing.” 

Mr. Greswold found his wife sitting alone 
in the spacious front drawing-room, near the 
open piano at which Castellani had made 
such exquisite music last night. She had 
been playing a little, trying to find comfort 
in those grand strains of Beethoven which 
were to her as the prophecies of Isaiah, or 
the loftiest passages in the Apocalypse ; seek- 
ing comfort and hope, but finding none. And 
now she was sitting gazing sadly at the 
waste of waters, and thinking that her own 
future life resembled that gray and barren 
sea, a wide and sunless waste, with neither 
haven nor shore in sight. 

At the sound of her husband’s footsteps 
entering unannounced at the farther door, she 
started up, with her heart beating vehemently, 
speechless and trembling. She felt as if they 
were meeting after years of absence — felt as if 
she must go to him and fling herself upon his 
breast and claim him as her own again, con- 
fessing herself too weak and earthly a creat- 
ure to live without that sAveet human love. 

She had to steel herself by the thought of 
obedience to a higher lavr than that of human 
passion. She stood before him deathly pale, 
but firm as a rock. 

He came close up to her, laid his hand | 
upon her shoulder, and looked her in the 
face, earnestly, solemnly even. 

“Mildred, is it irrevocable? Can you sac- 
rifice me for a scruple?” 

“It is more than a scruple— it is the cer- 
tainty that there is but one right course, and 
that I must hold by it to the end.” 


“That certainty does not come out of 
your own heart or your own mind. It is 
Cancellor who has made this law for you — 
Cancellor, a fanatic, who knows nothing of 
the length and breadth and divine power of 
domestic love — Cancellor, a man without a 
wife and without a home. Is he to be the 
judge between you and me? Is he who 
knows nothing of the sacredness of wedded 
ties to be alloAved to break them — only be- 
cause he wears a cassock and has an eloquent 
tongue?” 

“ It was he who taught me my duty when 
I was a child. I accept his teaching now as 
implicitly as I accepted it then.” 

“And you do not mind breaking my heart 
— that does not hurt you?” said Greswold, 
growing angry. 

His face was as pallid as hers, and his lips 
trembled, half in anger, half in scorn. 

“ Oh, George, you know my own heart is 
breaking. There can be no greater pain pos- 
sible to humanity than I have suffered since 
I left you.” ^ 

“ And you will inflict this agony, and bear 
this agony. You will break two hearts be- 
cause of an anomaly in the marriage law — a 
rag of Rome — a source of profit to pope and 
priest — a prohibition made to be annulled — 
for the good of the Church. Do you know, 
how foolish a law it is, child, for which you 
show this blind reverence? Do you know 
that it is only a bigoted minority among the 
nations that still abides by it? Do you know 
that in that great new world across the seas 
a woman may be a wife in one colony, and 
not a wife in another — honorable here, de- 
spised there? It is all too foolish. What is 
it to either of us if my first Avife was your 
half-sister — a fact which neither of us can 
prove or disprove?” 

“God help me, it is proved only too clearly 
to me. We bear the mark of our birthright 
in our faces. You must have seen that, 
George, long before I saw Fay’s portrait in 
your hands. Are we not alike?” 
j “ Not with the likeness of sisters. There 
is a look which might be a family likeness 
— a look Avhich puzzled me like the faint mem- 
ory of a dream when first I knew you. It 
was long before I discovered what the like- 
ness was and where it lay. At most it was 
but a line here and there. The arch of the 
brow, the form of the eyelid, an expression 


no 


THE FATAL THREE. 


about the mouth when you smile. Such ac- 
cidental resemblances are common enough. 
She was as much like Cesare Castellani as she 
is like you. I have seen a look in his face 
‘that curiously recalls an expression of hers. ” 

“George, if I were not convinced, do you 
think I would grieve you, and sacrifice all I 
have of earthly happiness? I cannot reason 
upon this question. My conscience has an- 
swered it for me.” 

“ So be it. Let conscience be your guide, 
and not love. I have done.” 

He took both her hands in his, and held 
them long, looking in her face as he went on 
with what he had to say to her, gravely, 
without anger, but with a touch of coldness 
that placed her very far away from him, and 
marked the beginning of a life-long strange- 
ness. 

“ It is settled, then,” he said, “ we part for- 
ever; but we are not going to air our story 
in the law courts, or fill latest editions of 
evening papers with the details of our mis- 
ery. We don’t want the law to annul our 
marriage upon the ground of a forbidden 
affinity, and to cast a slur upon our child in 
her grave.” 

“No, no, no.” 

‘ ‘ Then, though we are to spend our lives 
apart henceforward, in the eyes of the world 
you will still be my wife; and I would not 
have the lady who was once my wife placed 
in a false , position. You cannot wander 
about the Continent alone, Mildred — you are 
too young and too attractive to travel with- 
out companionship. I have brought Pamela 
to be your companion. The presence of my 
niece at your side will tell the world that you 
have done no wrong to me or my name. It 
may be fairly supposed that we part from 
some incompatibility of temper. You need 
give no explanations, and you may be assured 
I shall answer no questions.” 

“You are very good,” she faltered. “I 
shall be glad to have your niece with me — 
only I am afraid the life will be a dreary one 
for her.” 

“She does not think that. She is much 
attached to you. She is a frank, warm- 
hearted girl, with some common-sense under 
a surface of frivolity. She is at my hotel 
near at hand. If you think your aunt will 
give her hospitality, she can come to you at 
once, and j^ou and she can discuss all your 


plans together. If there is anything in the 
way of business or money matters that I can 
arrange for you — ” 

“No, there is nothing,” she said, in a low 
voice, and then suddenly she threw herself 
on her knees at his feet, and clasped his 
hand, and cried over it. 

“ George, if you will only say you forgive 
me before we part forever,” she pleaded. 
“Pity me, dear, pity and pardon!” 

“Yes, I forgive you,” he said, gently rais- 
ing her in his arras, and leading her to the 
sofa. “Yes, child, I pity you. It is not your 
fault that we are miserable. It may be bet- 
ter that we should part thus. The future 
might be still darker if we did not separate. 
Good-by.” 

He bent over her as she sat in a drooping 
attitude, with her forehead leaning against 
the end of the sofa, her hand and arm hang- 
ing lax and motionless at her side. He laid 
his hand upon her head as if in blessing, and 
then left her without another word. 

“The future might be still darker if we 
did not separate.” 

She repeated the sentence slowly, ponder- 
ing it as if it had been an enigma. 

Miss Fausset expressed herself pleased to 
receive Miss Ransorae as long as it might suit 
Mildred’s convenience to stay in Lewes Cres- 
cent. 

“Your husband has acted like a gentle- 
man,” she said, after Mildred had explained 
that it was George Greswold’s wish his niece 
should accompany her abroad. ‘ ‘ He is al- 
together superior to the common run of men. 
This young lady belongs to the Anglican 
Church, I hope.” 

“Decidedly, aunt.” 

“Then she cannot fail to appreciate the 
services at St. Edmund’s,” said Miss Fausset, 
and thereupon gave orders that the second- 
best spare room should be made ready for 
Miss Ransome. 

Pamela arrived before afternoon tea, bring- 
ing Box, who was immediately relegated to 
the care of the maids in the basement, and 
! the information that Mr. Greswold had gone 
; back to Romsey by the coast-line, and was 
I likely to arrive at Enderby some time before 
midnight. Pamela was somewhat embar- 
rassed for the first quarter of an hour, and 
was evidently afraid of Miss Fausset; but 


THE FATAL THREE. 


Ill 


with her usual adaptability, she was soon at 
home, even in that chilly and colorless draw-, 
ing-room. She was even reconciled to the 
banishment of Box, feeling that it was a priv- 
ilege to have him anywhere in that prim and 
orderly mansion, and intending to have him 
clandestinely introduced into her bedroom 
when the household retired for the night. 

She pictured him as pining with grief in 
his exile; and it would have been a consider- 
able surprise to her could she have seen him 
basking in the glow of the fire in the house- 
keeper’s room, snapping up pieces of muffin 
thrown him by Franz, and beaming with in- 
telligence upon the company. 

A larger tea-table than usual had been set 
out in the inner drawing-room, with two tea- 
pots, and a tempting array of dainty biscuits 
and tea-cakes, such as the idle mind loveth. 
It was Miss Fausset’s afternoon for receiving 
her friends, and from four o’clock upward 
carriages were heard to draw up below, and 
well - dressed matrons, and smiling, silent 
daughters dribbled into the room and talked 
afternoon tea-talk, chiefly matters connected 
with the Church of St. Edmund’s, and the 
various charities and institutions associated 
with that temple. 

It seemed very slow, dull talk to the ears 
of Pamela, who had been vitiated by sport- 
ing society, in which afternoon tea generally 
smelled of spent cartridges or pig-skin, and 
where conversation was sometimes enlivened 
by the handing round of a new gun, or a 
patent rat-trap, for general inspection. She 
tried to make talk with one of the youngest 
ladies present, by asking her if she was fond 
of tennis ; but she felt herself snubbed when 
the damsel told her she had one of the worst 
districts in Brighton, and no time for amuse- 
ments of any kind. 

Everybody had taken tea, and it was near- 
ly six o’clock when the feminine assembly 
became suddenly fluttered and alert at the 
announcement of two gentlemen of clerical 
aspect, one tall, bulky, shabby, and clumsy- 
looking, with a large pallid face, heavy feat- 
ures, heavier brows ; the other small and 
dapper, dressed to perfection in a strictly 
clerical fashion, with fair compl^ion and 
neat auburn beard. The flrst was Mr. Mal- 
travers. Vicar of St. Edmund’s ; the second 
was his curate, the Honorable and Reverend 
Percival Cromer, fourth son of Lord Lowes- 


toft. It was considered a grand thing for St. 
Edmund’s that it had a man of acknowledged 
power and eloquence for its vicar, and a 
peer’s son for its curate. 

Mr. Cromer was at once absorbed by a vol- 
uble matron who, with her three daughters, 
had lingered in the hope of his dropping in 
after vespers; but he contrived somehow to 
release himself from the sirens, and to draw 
Miss Ransome into the conversation, without 
waiting for an introduction. Miss Fausset 
in the mean time made the vicar known to 
Mildred. 

“You have often heard me speak of my 
niece,” she said, when the introduction had 
been made. 

Mildred was sitting apart from the rest, in 
the bay-window of the inner room. She had 
withdrawn herself there on pretence of want- 
ing light for her needle- wol-k, the same group 
of azaleas she had been working upon at En- 
derby, but really in order to be alone with her 
troubled thoughts ; and now Miss Fausset 
approached her with the tall, ponderous fig- 
ure of the priest, in his long threadbare coat. 

She looked up and found him scrutinizing 
her intently under heavy bent brows. It was 
a clever face that so looked at her, but it did 
not engage her sympathy, or convince her of 
the owner’s goodness, as Clement Canceller’s 
face had always done. 

“Yes, I have heard you speak of Mrs. 
Greswold, your only near relative, I think,” 
he said, addressing Miss Fausset, but never 
taking his eyes off Mildred. 

He dropped into a chair near Mildred, and 
Miss Fausset went back to her duty at the 
tea-table, and to Join in the conversation 
started by Mr. Cromer, which had more anh 
mation than any previous conversation that 
afternoon. 

“You find your aunt looking well, I hope, 
Mrs. Greswold?” began the vicar, not very 
brilliantly; but what his speech wanted in 
meaning was made up by the earnestness of 
his dark gray eyes, under beetling brows, 
which seemed to penetrate Mildred’s inmost 
thoughts. 

“Yes, she looks— as she has always done 
since I can remember— like a person superior 
to all mortal feebleness.” 

“ She is superior to all other women I have 
ever met, a woman of truly remarkable pow- 
er and steadfastness; but with natures like 


112 


THE FATAL THREE. 


hers the sword is sometimes stronger than 
the scabbard. That slender, upright form 
has an appearance of physical delicacy, as 
well as mental refinement. Y our aunt’s m ind 
is a tower of strength, Mrs. Greswold. She 
has been my strong rock from the beginning 
of my ministry here; but I tremble for the 
hour when her health may break down under 
the task-work she exacts from herself. ” 

“I know that she has a district, but I do 
not know any of the details of her work,” 
said Mildred. “ Is it very hard?” 

“It is very hard, and very continuous. 
She labors unremittingly among the poor, 
and she does a great deal of work of a wider 
and more comprehensive kind. She is deaf 
to no appeal to her charity. The most dis- 
tant claims receive her thoughtful attention, 
even where she does not feel it within the 


boundary line of her duty to give substantial 
aid. She writes more letters than many a 
private secretary, and, oh, Mrs. Greswold, to 
you as very near and dear to her, I may 
say what I would say to no other creature 
living. It has been my blessed office to be 
brought face to face with her in the sacra- 
ment of confession. I have seen the veil 
lifted from before that white and spotless 
soul; spotless, yes, in a world of sinners! I 
know what a woman your aunt is.” 

His low searching tones fell distinctly upon 
Mildred’s ear, yet hardly rose above a whis- 
per. The babble, lay and clerical, went on 
in the other drawing-room, and these two 
were as much alone in the shadow of the 
window-curtains and the gray light of the 
fading day as if they had been priest and 
penitent at a confessional. 


CHAPTER VI. 

THE TIME HAS COME. 


Three days later Mildred and her young 
companion started for Italy. The doctor 
declared that the departure was premature. 
Mrs. Greswold was not strong enough to un- 
dertake such a fatiguing journey. But mod- 
ern civilization has smoothed the roads that 
lead over the civilized world, and for a lady 
who travels with a maid and a courier jour- 
neys are rendered very easy; besides, Mildred 
had made up her mind to leave Brighton at 
any hazard. 

The hour of parting came for Pamela and 
Castellani, and although the young lady took 
care to remind him at least a dozen times a 
day of that impending severance, not one 
word of the future, or of any cherished hope 
on his part, fell from his lips. And yet it 
had seemed to Pamela that he was devoted 
to her — that he only waited for the opportu- 
nity to speak. It seemed to her, also, that 
he felt the pain of parting, for he had an air 
of deepest melancholy during these farewell 
days, and talked only of saddest themes. He 
was in Lewes Crescent nearly all day long — 
he played the most mournful strains— he had 
the air of a man oppressed with a secret sor- 
row; but never a word of love or marriage 


did he breathe to Pamela. He pressed her 
hand gently, with an almost paternal affec- 
tion, as she leaned out of the carriage which 
was to take her to the station, and bade him 
a last good-by. 

“Good-by!” she half sang, half sobbed, in 
the darkness at the back of the hired landau, 
as they drove bumping down St. James’s 
Street. “Good-by, summer; good-by every- 
thing.” 

She did not even give a glance at Hanning- 
ton’s autumn fashions as they drove up the 
hill. She felt that life was no longer worth 
living for or dressing for. 

“ He never could have cared for me,” she 
thought, as she dropped her silent tears upon 
Box’s V-shaped ears; “ and yet he seemed — 
he seemed ! Does he seem like that to every 
girl, I wonder? Is he all seeming?” 

After this came a leisurely journey, and 
then long, slow weeks of luxurious repose 
amid fairest surroundings — a life which, to 
those who have lived and fought the great 
battle, and come wounded but yet alive out 
of the fray, is the life paradisaic; but for the 
fresh, strong soul, panting for emotions and 
excitements, like a young bird that yearns to, 





THE FATAL THREE. 


113 


try the strength of his wings, this kind of 
languid existence seems like a foretaste of 
death and nothingness. Mountains and lakes 
were not enough for Pamela*; the azure of 
an Italian sky, the infinite variety of sunset 
■ splendors, the brightness of a morning her- 
alded by a roseate flush on snow-capped hills 
—all these were futile where the heart was 
empty. Mildred’s maturer grief found some 
consolations in these exquisite surroundings; 
but Pamela wanted to live, and that magic 
circle of mountains seemed to her as the 
’ walls of a gigantic prison. 

“It was so nice at Brighton,” she said, 
looking along the burnished mirror of the 
lake with despondent eyes, tired of the mys- 
tery of those reflected mountains, descended 
into infinite depths, a world inverted — “so 
gay, so cheery, always something going on. 
Don’t you think, aunt, that the air of this 
place is very relaxing?” 

That word relaxing is tbe key-note of dis- 
content. It is a word that can blight the 
loveliest spots the sun ever shone upon. It 
is the speck upon the peach. Be sure that, 
before ever he mentioned the apple, Satan 
told Eve that Eden was very relaxing. 

“I hope you are not unhappy here, my 
^ dear Pamela ?” said Mildred, evading the 
question. 

“Unhappy? oh no, indeed, dear aunt; I 
could not be otherwise than happy with you 
anywhere. There are lots of people who 
would envy me living on the shore of Lake 
Maggiore, and seeing those delightful mount- 
ains all day long; but I did so enjoy Brigh- 
ton— the theatre, the Pavilion— always some- 
thing going on.” 

The two ladies had their own suite of 
apartments in the hotel, and lived in that 
genteel seclusion which is the privilege of 
wealth as well as of rank all over the world. 
Pamela envied the tourists of Cook and Gaze, 
as she saw them trooping into the table-d'hote, 
or heard their clatter in the public drawing- 
room. It was all very well to sit in one’s 
own balcony gazing at the placid lake while 
the rabble amused themselves below. One 
felt one’s superior status, and the advantage 
of being somebody instead of nobody; but 
when the rabble danced, or acted charades, 
or played dumb crambo, or squabbled over 
a game at nap, they seemed to have the best 
of it somehow. 

S 


“ I almost wish I had been born a vulga- 
rian,” sighed Pamela one evening, when the 
tourists were revolving to the Myosotis waltz 
banged out on an elderly cast-iron grand in 
the salon below. 

Mildred did all she could in the way of ex- 
cursionizing to enliven the dulness of their 
solitary life, but the beauties of nature palled 
upon Pamela’s lively mind. However the 
day might be occupied in drives to distant 
scenes of surpassing loveliness, the ever- 
lengthening evenings had to be spent in the 
Louis Quatorze salon, where no visitors 
dropped in to disturb the monotony of books 
and work, piano and pet dog. 

For Mildred, too, those evening hours seem- 
ed unutterably long, and as autumn deepen- 
ed into winter her burden seemed heavier to 
bear. Time brought no consolation, offered 
no hope. She had lost all that had made life 
worth living : first, the child who represented 
all that was brightest and fairest and gayest 
and most hopeful in her life; next, the hus- 
band who was her life itself, the prop and 
staff, the column around which every tendril 
of her being was entwined. There was noth- 
ing for her in the future but a life of self- 
abnegation, of working and living for others. 
The prospect seemed dark and dreary, and 
she knew now how small a margin of her life 
had been devoted to God. The idea of de- 
voting herself wholly was too repellent. She 
knew now that she was very human, wedded 
to earthly loves and earthly happiness, need- 
ing a long purgation before she could attain* 
the saintly attitude. 

She thought of Enderby every night as she 
sat in silent melancholy beside the hearth, 
where a solitary log crumbled slowly to white 
ashes on the marble, and where the faint 
warmth had a perfume of distant pine-woods 
— she thought of Enderby and its widowed 
master. Was he living there still, or was he, 
too, a wanderer? She had heard nothing of 
his movements since she left England. Pa- 
mela had an occasional letter from her sister, 
but the onl)'' news in Rosalind’s letters was of 
the extraordinary development — intellectual 
and otherwise — of the baby, and the magni- 
tude of Sir Henry’s bag. Beyond the'! baby 
and the bag. Lady Mountford’s pen rarely 
travelled. 

Mildred thought of that absent husband 
with an aching heart. There were times 


/ 


114 


THE FATAL THREE. 


when she asked herself if she had done well 
— when she was tempted to total surrender 
—when the pen was in her hand ready to 
write a telegram imploring him to come to 
her — or where she was on the point of giv- 
ing her orders for an immediate return to 
England. But pride and principle alike re- 
strained her. She had taken her own course, 
she had made up her mind deliberately, after 
long thought and many prayers. She could 
not tread the backward path, the primrose 
path of sin. She could but pray for greater 
strength, for loftier purpose, for the grand 
power of self-forgetfulness which makes for 
heaven. 

Christmas came and found her in this 
frame of mind. There were very few tour- 
ists now, and the long corridors had a sepul- 
chral air, the snowy mountain - tops were 
blotted out by mist and rain. For Pamela 
Christmas-tide had been a season of much 
gayety hitherto — a season of new frocks and 
many dances, hunting and hunt balls, and 
the change was a severe test of that young 
lady’s temper. She came through the ordeal 
admirably, never forgot that she had prom- 
ised her uncle to be his wife’s faithful com- 
panion, and amused herself as best she could 
with Italian music and desultory studies. 
She read Mr. Sinnett’s books, studied Bohn’s 
edition of Plato’s dialogues, addled her youth- 
ful brain with various theories of a far-reach- 
ing kind, and fancied herself decidedly me- 
diumistio. That word mediumistic possessed 
a peculiar fascination for her. She had 
looked at Cesare Castellani’s eyeballs, which 
were markedly spherical— seemed, as it were, 
reflecting surfaces for the spirit world un- 
seen by the commonalty, a sure indication of 
the mediumistic temperament. She had 
seen other signs, and now in this romantic 
solitude, sauntering by the lake in the misty 
winter air, just before sundown, she fancied 
herself almost in communion with that ab- 
sent genius. Distance could not separate 
two people when both were eminently me- 
diumistic. 

“I believe he is thinking of me at this 
very moment,” she said to herself one after- 
noon at the end of the year, “and I have a 
kind of feeling that I shall see him — bodily 
— very soon.” 

She forgot to reckon with herself that this 
kind of feeling could count for very little. 


as she had experienced it in greater or less 
degree ever since she had left Brighton. In 
almost every excursion she had beguiled her- 
self with some pleasant day-dream. Castellan! 
would appear in the most unlooked-for man- 
ner at the resting-place where they were to 
lunch. He would have followed them from 
England at his leisure, and would come upon 
them unannounced, pleased to startle her by 
his sudden apparition. In absence she had 
recalled so many tender speeches, so many 
veiled hints of love; and she had taught her- 
self to believe that lie really cared for her, 
and had been withheld from a declaration 
by but a noble dignity which would not 
stoop to woo a woman richer than himself. 

“He is poor and proud,” she thought. 

Poor and proud. How sweet the allitera- 
tion sounded! 

She had thought of him so incessantly that 
it was hardly a coincidence, and yet it seem- 
ed to her a miracle when his voice sounded 
behind her in the midst of her reverie. 

“ You ought not to be out-of-doors. Miss 
Ransome, when the sun is so nearly down.” 

She turned and faced him, pale first with 
infinite pleasure, and then rosy to the roots 
of her flaxen hair. 

“ When did you come?” she asked, eager- 
ly. “ Have you been long in Italy?” 

“ I came through the St. Gothard only last 
night, and came straight here. I have not 
seen Mrs. Greswold yet. She is well, I 
hope?” 

“ She is not over-well. She frets dread- 
fully, I am afraid. It is so sad that she and 
Uncle George should be living apart, and no- 
body but themselves knows why. They 
were the most perfect couple.” 

“Mrs. Greswold is a perfect woman.” 

“ And Uncle George has the finest charac- 
ter, His first marriage was unhappy, I be- 
lieve ; nobody ever talked about it. I think 
it w^as only just known in the family that he 
had married in Italy when he was a young 
man, and that his wife had died witliin a 
year. It was supposed that she could not 
have been nice, since nobody knew anything 
about her.” 

“Rather hard upon the dead lady to be 
condemned by her husband’s silence. Will 
you take me to your aunt?” 

“ With pleasure. I think she ought to be 
charmed to see you, for we lead the most sol- 


THE FATAL THREE. 


115 


itary existence here. My aiint has set her 
face against knowing anybody, in the hotel 
or out of it. And there have been some 
really charming people staying here, people 
one would go out of one’s way to know. 
Have you come here for your health?” 

“For my pleasure only. I was sick to 
death of England and of cities. I longed to 
steep myself in the infinite and the beautiful. 
Those indigo shadows upon the mountain 
yonder — with that bold splash of orange 
shining through the gorge — are worth the 
journey, were there no more than that ; and 
when the wintry stars glass themselves in 
the lake by-and-by, ah, then one knows what 
it is to be the living, acting element in a 
world of beauty. And to think that there 
are men and women in London groping 
about in the fog, and fancying themselves 
alive!” 

“Oh, but there are compensations — the- 
atres, concerts, dances. ” 

“Miss Ransome, I fear you are a Philis- 
tine.” 

“Oh no, no; I adore nature. I should 
like to be above those common earthly pleas- 
ures — to journey from star to star along the 
planetary chain, rising at each transition to a 
higher level, until I came to the spirit world 
^liere— This is the hotel, and we are on 
the second floor. Would you like the lift?” 

“I never walk when I can be carried.” 

“Then we shall go up in the lift. I used 
to think it rather good fun at first,” said Pa- 
mela, with a sigh, remembering how soon the 
rapture of the ascent had begun to pall. 

Mildred received the unexpected visitor 
with marked coldness; but it was not easy 
to remain persistently cold while Pamela was 
so warm. Mr. Castellan! was one of those 
provoking people who refuse to see when 
they are unwelcome. He was full of talk, 
gay, bright, and varied. He had all the so- 
cial events of the past three months to talk 
about. Society had witnessed the most ex- 
traordinary changes — marriages — sudden 
deaths — everything unlooked for. There had 
been scandals, too, but these he touched upon 
lightly, and with a deprecating air, professing 
himself so sorry for everybody. 

Mildred allowed him to talk, and was, per- 
haps, a little more cordial when he took his 
leave than she had been when he came. He 
had prevented her from thinking her own 


thoughts for the space of an hour, and that 
was something for which to be grateful. He 
had come there in pursuit of Pamela, no 
doubt. He could have no other reason. He 
had been playing his own game, holding back 
in order to be the more gladly accepted when 
he should declare himself. It was thus Mil 
dred reasoned with herself ; and yet there 
had been looks and tones which it was diffi- 
cult for her to forget. 

“He is by profession a lady-killer,” she. 
argued ; “ no doubt he treats all women in 
the same way. He cannot help trying to fas- 
cinate them, and there are women like Ce- 
cilia Tomkison who are pleased to have sen- 
timental speeches made to them.” 

She persuaded herself that the looks and 
tones which had offended meant very little. 
For Pamela’s sake she would like to think 
well of him. 

“You have told me about a great many 
people,” she said, as he was leaving them, 
“but you have told me nothing about my 
husband. Did you hear if he was still at En- 
derby — and well?” 

“He was still at Enderby, up to the end 
of November, and I believe he was well. I 
spent three days at Riverdale, and heard of 
him from Mrs. Hillersdon.” 

Mildred asked no further question, nor did 
she invite Mr. Castellani to repeat his visit. 
Happily for his own success in life, he was 
not the kind of person to wait for invita- 
tions. 

“ I am staying in the hotel,” he said. “I 
hope I may drop in sometimes — to-morrow, 
even? Miss Ransome is good enough to say 
she would like to sing some duets with me.” 

“ Miss Ransome knows I have not been re- 
ceiving any visitors,” Mildred answered, with 
a touch of reproachfulness. 

“ Oh, but Mr. Castellani is an old friend. 
The people you avoided were strangers,” said 
Pamela, eagerly. 

Mildred made no further protest. Few men 
would have accepted a permission so grudg- 
ingly given ; but Castellani stopped at no ob- 
stacle when he had a serious purpose to serve; 
and in this case his purpose was very serious, 
for life or death, he told himself. 

He came next day, and the day after that, 
and every day for four or five weeks, till the 
first flush of precocious spring lent heauty to 
the landscape and softness to the sky. Mil- 


116 


THE FATAL THREE. 


dred submitted to his visits as an inevitable 
consequence of Pamela’s folly ; submitted, 
and by-and-by fell into the habit of being 
amused by Mr. Castellani; interested in his 
talk of men and women, and of books, of 
which he seemed to have read all of any 
mark that had ever been written. She al- 
lowed herself to be interested; she allowed 
herself to be soothed by his music ; she let 
him become an influence in her life, unawares, 
caught by a subtlety that had never been sur- 
passed by anybody of lesser gifts than Satan ; 
but never for one moment of her life did 
this presumptuous wooer beguile her into a 
thought that wronged her absent husband. 
Her intellect acknowledged the tempter’s in- 
tellectual sway, but her heart knew no wa- 
vering. 

Cesare Castellani had seen a good deal of 
life, but as he had assiduously cultivated the 
seamy side, it was hardly strange if he lacked 
the power of understanding a good and pure- 
minded woman. To his mind every woman 
was a citadel, better or worse defended, but 
always assailable by treason or strategy, force 
or art, and never impregnable. Mrs. Gres- 
wold was his Troy, his Thebes, his ideal of 
majesty and strength in woman. So far as 
virtue went upon this earth, he believed Mil- 
dred Greswold to be virtuous: proud, too; 
not a woman to lower her crest to the illicit 
conqueror, or stain her name with the shame 
of a runaway wife. But it had been given 
to him to disturb a union that had existed 
happily for fourteen years. It had been given 
to him to awaken the baneful passion of jeal- 
ousy, to sow the seeds of suspicion, to part 
husband and wife. He had gone to work 
carelessly enough in the first instance, struck 
with Mildred’s beauty and sweetness — full of 
sentimental recollections of the fair child- 
face and the bright streaming hair that had 
passed him like a vision in the sunlight of 
Hyde Park. He had envied the husband so 
fair a wife, so luxurious a home, with its air 
of old-world respectability, that deep-rooted 
English aristocracy of landed estate, which 
to the foreign adventurer seemed of all con- 
ditions in life the most enviable. He had 
been impelled by sheer malice when he ut- 
tered his careless allusion to George Gres- 
wold’s past life, and with a word blighted 
two hearts. 

He saw the effect of his speech in the face 


of the wife and in the manner of the hus- 
band, saw that he had launched a thunder- 
bolt. It was with deepest interest he fol- 
lowed up his advantage; watched and waited 
for further evidence of the evil he had done. 
He was a close student of the faces of women, 
above all when the face was lovely. He saw 
all the marks of secret care in Mrs. Gres- 
wold’s countenance during the weeks that 
elapsed between his flrst visit to Enderby 
and the charity concert. He saw the deep- 
ening shadows, the growing grief, and on the 
day of the concert he saw the traces of a still 
keener pain in those pale features and hag- 
gard eyes, but for an immediate separation 
between husband and wife he was not pre- 
pared. 

He heard at Riverdale of Mrs. Greswold’s 
departure from home. The suddenness and 
strangeness of her journey had set all the 
servants talking. He found out where she 
had gone, and hastened at once to call upon 
his devoted friend Mrs. Tomkison, who told 
him all she had to tell. 

“There is some great domestic misery— 
an intrigue on his part, I fear,” said the glib 
Cecilia. “Men are such traitors. It would 
hardly surprise me to-morrow if I was told 
that Adam was maintaining an expensive 
menage in St. John’s Wood. She would tell 
me nothing, poor darling; but she sent for 
Mr. Canceller, and was closeted with him for 
an hour. No doubt she told him everything. 
And then she went off to Brighton.” 

Castellani followed to Brighton, and his 
influence with Miss Fausset enabled him to 
learn something, but not all. Not one word 
said Miss Fausset about the supposed identi- 
ty between George Greswold’s flrst wife and 
John Fausset’s protegee; but she told Mr. 
Castellani that she feared her niece’s separa- 
tion from her husband would be permanent. 

“Why does she not divorce him,” he 
asked, “ if he has wronged her?” 

“ He has not wronged her— in the way you 
mean. And if he had, she could not divorce 
him unless he had beaten her. You men 
made the law, and framed it in your own 
f av-or. It is a very sad case, Cesare, and I am 
not at liberty to say any more about it. You 
must ask me no more questions.” 

Castellani obeyed for the time being; but 
he did ask further questions upon other oc- 
casions, and he exercised all his subtlety in 


THE FATAL THREE. 


117 


the endeavor to extract information from 
Miss Fausset. That lady, however, was in- 
flexible, and he had to wait for time to solve 
the mystery. 

“They have parted on account of that first 
marriage,” he told himself. “Perhaps she 
has found out all about the poor lady’s fate, 
and takes the worst view of the catastrophe. 
That would account for their separation. She 
would not stay with a husband she suspect- 
ed ; he would not live with a wife who could 
so suspect. A very pretty quarrel.” 

A quarrel — a life-long severance — but not 
a divorce. There was the difficulty. Cesare 
Castellani believed himself invincible with 
women. The weakest, and in some cases 
the worst, of the sex had educated him into 
the belief that no woman lived who could 
resist him. And here was a woman whom 
he intensely admired, and whose married 
life it had been his happy privilege to wreck. 
She. was a rich woman — and it was essential 
to his success in life that he should marry 
wealth. With all his various gifts he was 
not a money-earning man; he would never 
attain even lasting renown by his talents; 
for when the good fairies had endowed him 
with music and poetry, eloquence and grace, 
the strong-minded, hard-featured fairy called 
Perseverance came to his christening-feast, 
and seeing no knife and fork laid for her, 
doomed him to the curse of idleness. He 
had all the talents which enable a man to 
shine in society, but he had also the money- 
spending talent, the elegant tastes and incli- 
nations which require some thousands a year 
for their sustenance. Hitherto he had lived 
by his wits— from hand to mouth ; but for 
some years past he had been on the lookout 
for a rich wife. 

He knew that Mildred Greswold was three 
times richer than Pamela Ransome. The 
fortunes of the Faussets came well within 
the region of his knowledge ; and he knew 
how large a fortune John Fausset had left 
his daughter, and how entirely that fortune 
was at her own disposal. He might have 
had Pamela for the asking— Pamela, with 
a paltry fifteen hundred a year; Pamela, who 
sang false and bored him beyond measure. 
The higher prize seemed impossible ; but it 
was his nature to attempt the impossible. 
His belief in his own power was boundless. 

“She cannot divorce her husband,” he 


told himself, “ but he may divorce her if she 
should wrong him, or even seem to wrong 
him ; and the most innocent woman may be 
compromised if her lover is daring, will risk 
much for a great coup, as I would.” 

He thought himself very near success in 
these lengthening afternoons in the begin- 
ning of February, when he was allowed to 
spend the lovely hour of sundown in Mrs. 
Greswold’s salon, watching the sunset from 
the wide plate- glass window which com- 
manded a panorama of lake and mountain, 
with every exquisite change from concen- 
trated light to suffused color, and then to 
deepening purple that slowly darkened into 
the blackness of night. It was the hour in 
which it was deemed dangerous to be out-of- 
doors, but it was the loveliest hour of the 
day or the night, and Mildred never wearied 
of that glorious outlook over lake and sky. 
She was silent for the most part at such a 
time, sitting in the shadow of the window- 
curtains, her face hidden from the other two, 
sitting apart from the world, thinking of the 
life that had been and could never be again. 

Sometimes in the midst of her sad thoughts 
Castellani would strike a chord on the piano 
at the other end of the room, and then a ten- 
der strain of melody would steal out of the 
darkness, and that veiled tenor voice would 
sing some of the saddest lines of Heine, the 
poet of the broken heart, sadder than Byron, 
sadder than Musset, sad with the sadness of 
one who had never known joy. Those words 
wedded to some tender German melody al- 
ways moved Mildred Greswold to tears. Cas- 
tellani saw her tears and thought they were 
given to him , such tears as yielding virtue 
gives to the tempter. He knew tlie power 
of his voice, the fascination of music for 
those in whom the love of music is a part of 
their being. He could not foresee the possi- 
bility of failure. He was already admitted 
to that kind of intimacy which is the first 
stage of success He was an almost daily 
visitor; he came upon the two ladies in their 
walks and drives, and contrived, unbidden, 
to make himself their companion, he chose 
the books that both were to read, and made 
himself useful in getting library parcels sent 
from Milan or Paris He contrived to make 
himself indispensable, or at least thought 
himself so- Pamela’s eagerness filled up all 
the gaps; she was so full of talk and vivacity 


THE FATAL THREE. 


118 

that it was not easy to be sure about the 1 
sentiments of her more silent companion ; 
but Cesare Castellani’s vanity was the key 
with which he read Mildred’s character and 
feelings. 

“She is a sphinx,” he told himself, “but 
I think I can solve her mystery. The mag- 
netic power of such a love as mine must 
draw her to me, sooner or later.” 

Mr. Castellan! had a profound belief in his 
own magnetism. That word magnetic had 
a large place in his particular creed. He 
talked of certain fascinating women— gener- 
ally a little passee — 'sis “magnetic.” He 
prided himself upon being a magnetic man. 

While Cesare Castellan! flattered himself 
that he was on the threshold of success, Mil- 
dred Greswold was deliberating how best to 
escape from him and his society forever. 
Had she been alone there need have been no 
difiiculty ; but she saw Pamela’s happiness 
involved in his presence, she saw the fresh 
young cheek pale at the thought of separa- 
tion, and she was perplexed how to act for 
the best. Had Pamela been her daughter 
she could not have considered her feelings 
more tenderly. She told herself that Mr. 
Castellan! would be a very bad match for 
Miss Ransome, yet when she saw the girl’s 
face grow radiant at the sound of his foot- 
steps, when she watched her dulness in his 
absenee, that everlasting air of waiting for 
somebody which marks the girl who is in 
love, she found herself hoping that the Ital- 
ian would make a formal proposal, and in- 
clined to meet him half-way. 

But the new year was six weeks old and 
he had not even hinted at matrimonial inten- 
tions, so Mildred felt constrained to speak 
plainly. 

“ My dearest Pamela, we are drifting into 
a very uncomfortable position with Mr. Cas- 
tellan!, ” she began, gently. ‘ ‘ He comes here 
day after day as if he were your fiance, and 
yet he has said nothing definite.” 

Pamela grew crimson at this attack, and 
her hands began to tremble over her crewel- 
work, though she tried to go on working. 

“I respect him all the more for being in 
no haste to declare himself, Aunt Mildred,” 
she said, rather angrily. “If he were the 
kind of adventurer you once thought him he 
would have made me an offer ages ago. 
Why should he not come to see us ? I’m 


sure he’s very amusing and very useful. 
Even you seem interested in him and cheered 
by him. Why should he not come? We 
have no one’s opinion to study in a foreign 
hotel.” 

“I don’t know about that, dear. People 
always hear about things; and it might in- 
jure you by-and-by in society to have your 
name associated with Mr. Castellan!.” 

“lam sure I should be very proud of it,” 
retorted Pamela; “very proud to have my 
name associated with genius.” 

“And you really, honestly believe you 
could be happy as his wife, Pamela?” asked 
Mildred, gravely. 

“I know that I can never be happy with 
any one else. I don’t consider myself par- 
ticularly clever, aunt, but I believe I have 
the artistic temperament. Life without art 
would be a howling wilderness for me.” 

“Life means a long time, dear. Think 
what a difference it must make whether you 
lead it with a good or a bad man.” 

“All the goodness in the world would not 
make me happy with a husband who was not 
musical, nor John Howard, nor John Wesley, 
nor John Bunyan, nor any of your model 
Johns. John Milton was," added Pamela, 
rather vaguely, “and handsome into the bar- 
gain, but I’m afraid he was a little dry" 

“Promise me at least this much, Pamela: 
first, that you will take no step without your 
uncle’s knowledge and advice ; and next, that 
if ever you marry Mr. Castellan! you will 
have your fortune strictly settled upon your- 
self,” 

“Oh, aunt, how sordid! But perhaps it 
would be best. If I had the money I should 
give it all to him ; but if he had the money, 
with his artistic temperament, he would be 
sure to lavish it all upon other people. He 
would not be able to pass a picturesque beg- 
gar without emptying his pockets. Do you 
remember how he was impressed by the four 
old men on the church steps the other day?” 

“Yes, but I don’t think he gave them any- 
thing.” 

“Not while we were with him, but you 
may be sure he did afterwards.” 

After this conversation Mrs. Greswold 
made up her mind on two points. She would 
arrange for a prompt departure to the neigh- 
borhood of Lucerne or Montreux, whichever 
might be advised for the spring season ; and 


119 


THE FATAL THREE, 


she would sound Mr. Castellan! as to his in- 
tentions. It was not fair to Pamela that she 
should be kept in the dark any longer, that 
the gentleman should be allowed to sing duets 
with her, and advise her studies, and join her 
in her walks, and yet give no definite expres- 
sion to his regard. 

Mildred tried to think the best of him as a 
suitor for her husband’s niece. She knew 
that he was clever; she knew that he was fair- 
ly well born. On his mother’s side he sprang 
from the respectable commercial classes; on 
his father’s side he belonged to the art world. 
There was nothing debasing in such a lineage. 
From neither her friend Mrs. Tomkison nor 
from Miss Fausset had she heard anything to 
his discredit, and both those ladies had known 
him long. There could therefore be no ob- 
jection on the score of character. Pamela 
ought to make a much better marriage in the 
way of means and position; but those excel- 
lent and well chosen alliances which the wis- 
dom of friends forces upon the rebellious 
heart of youth are sometimes known to re- 
sult in evil ; and, in a word, why should not 
Pamela be happy in her own way? 

Having thus reasoned with herself, Mildred 
watched for an opportunity to speak to Cas- 
tellani. She had not long to wait for it. He 
called rather earlier than usual one afternoon 
when Pamela had gone out for a mountain 
ramble with her dog and her maid, to search 
for those pale and premature flowers which 
bloom with the first breath of spring. Cas- 
tellan! had seen the young lady leave the ho- 
tel soon after the mid-day meal, armed with 
her alpen-stock, and her attendant carrying a 
basket. She had fondly hoped that he would 
follow and offer to join her expedition, to dig 
out baby ferns from sheltered recesses, to 
hunt for mountain crocus and many-hued 
anemones ; but he observed her departure, 
perdu behind a window-curtain in the read 
ing-room, and half an hour afterwards he was 
ushered into Mrs. Greswold’s drawing-room 

“I feared you were ill,” he said, “ as I saw 
Miss Ransome excursionizing without you ” 

“I have a slight headache, and felt more 
inclined for a book than for a long walk. 
Why did you not go with Pamela? I dare 
say she would have been glad of your com- 
pany. Peterson is not a very lively compan- 
ion for a mountain ramble ” 

“Poor Miss Ransome! How sad to be a 


young English Mees, and to have to be chap- 
eroned by a person like Peterson !” said Cas- 
tellan!, with a careless shrug. “No; I had 
no inclination to join in the hyacinth hunt. 
Miss Ransome told me yesterday what she 
was going to do. I have no passion for wild- 
flowers or romantic walks.’* 

“But you seem to have a great liking for 
Miss Ransome’s society,” replied Mildred, 
gravely. “You have cultivated it very as- 
siduously since you came here, and I think I 
may be excused for fancying that you came 
to Pallanza on her account.” 

“You may be excused for thinking any- 
thing wild and foolish, because you are a 
woman and wilfully blind,” he answered, 
drawing his chair a little nearer to hers, and 
lowering his voice with a touch of tenderness. 
“But surely — surely you cannot think that 
I came to Pallanza on Miss Ransome’s ac- 
count.” 

‘ ‘ I might not have thought so had you 
been a less frequent visitor in this room, 
where you have come — pardon me for saying 
so — very much of your own accord. I don’t 
think it was quite delicate or honorable to 
come here so often, to be so continually in 
the society of a frank, impressionable girl, 
unless you had some deeper feeling for her 
than casual admiration.” 

“Mrs. Greswold, upon my honor I have 
never in the whole course of my acquaintance 
with Miss Ransome by one word or tone im- 
plied any warmer feeling than that which 
you call casual admiration ” 

“ And you are not attached to her— you do 
not cherish the hope of winning her for your 
wife?” asked Mildred, seriously, looking at 
him with earnest eyes. 

That calm, grave look chilled him to the 
core of his heart. His brow flushed, his eyes 
grew dark and troubled. He felt as if the 
crisis of his life were approaching, and so fai 
augury was unfavorable. 

“I have never cherished any such hope; I 
never shall. ” 

“Then why have you come here so con- 
tinually?” 

“ For God’s sake do not ask me that ques- 
tion! The time has not come.” 

“Yes, Mr. Castellan!, the time has come. 
The question should have been asked sooner. 
You have compromised Miss Ransome by 
your meaningless assiduities. You have 


120 


THE FATAL THREE. / 


compromised me, for I ouglit to have taken 
better care of her than to allow an acquaint- 
ance of so ambiguous a character. But I am 
very glad that I have spoken, and that you 
have replied plainly. From to-day your vis- 
its must cease. We shall go to the Engadine 
in a few days. Let me beg that you will not 
happen to be travelling in the same diree- 
tion.” 

Mildred was deeply indignant. She had 
cheapened her husband’s niece — Gilbert Ran- 
some’s co-heiress — a girl whom half the young 
men in London would have considered a prize 
in the matrimonial market; and this man, 
who had haunted her at home and abroad for 
the last seven or eight weeks, dared now to 
tell her that his attentions were motiveless, so 
far as her nieee was concerned. 

“ Oh, Mildred, do not banish me!” he cried, 
passionately. “You must have understood. 
You must know that it is you, and you onl}^ 
for whom I care ; you, whose presence makes 
life lovely for me, in whose absence I am lost 
and wretched. You have wrung my secret 
from me. I did not mean to offend. I would 
have respected your strange widowhood. I 
would have waited half a lifetime. Only to 
see you, to be near you — your slave, your 
proud, too happy slave. That was all I would 
have asked. Why may not that be? Why 
may I not come and go, like the summer wind 


that breathes round you, like the flowers that 
look in at your window — faithful as your 
dog, patient as old Time! Why may it not 
be, Mildred?” 

She stood up suddenly before him, white 
to the lips, and with cold contempt in those 
eyes which he had seen so lovely with the 
light of affection when they had looked at 
her husband. She looked at him unfalter- 
ingly, as she might have looked at a worm. 
Anger had made her pale, but that was all. 

“You must have had a strange experience 
of women before you would dare to talk to 
any honest woman in such a strain as this, 
Mr, Castellani,” she said. “I will not lower 
myself so far as to tell you what I think of 
your conduct. Miss Ransome shall know 
the kind of person whose society she has en- 
dured. I must beg that you will consider 
yourself as much a stranger to her as to me, 
from to-day.” 

She moved towards the bell, but he inter- 
cepted her. 

“You are very cruel,” he said; “but the 
day will come when you will be sorry that 
you rejected the most devoted love that was 
ever offered to woman in order to be true to 
broken bonds.” 

“They are not broken. They will hold 
me to my dying hour.” 

“ Yes, to a madman and a murderer.” 


CHAPTER VII. 

NOT PROVEN. 


Mildred stood speechless for some mo- 
ments after those words of Castellani’s, look- 
ing at him with kindling eyes. 

‘ ‘ How dare you !” she cried at last. ‘ ‘ How 
dare you accuse my husband — the best, the 
noblest of men !” 

“The best and noblest of men do strange 
things sometimes, upon an evil impulse, and 
when they are not quite right here,” touch- 
ing his forehead. 

“ My husband, George Greswold, is too 
high a mark for your malignity. Do you 
think you can make me believe evil of him, 
after fourteen years of married life? His in- 
tellect is the clearest and the soundest I have 
ever found in man or woman. You can no 


more shake my faith in his power of brain 
than in his goodness of heart. ” 

‘ ‘ Perhaps not. The George Greswold you 
know is a gentleman of commanding intellect 
and unblemished character, granted. But the 
George Ransome whom I knew seventeen 
years ago was a gentleman who was shrewd- 
ly suspeeted of having made away with his 
wife, and who was confined in a public asy- 
lum in the environs of Nice as a dangerous 
lunatic. If you doubt these facts, you have 
only to go to Nice, or to St Jean, where Mr. 
Ransome and his wife lived for some time in 
a turtle-dove retirement, which ended tragi- 
cally. Seventeen years does not obliterate 
the evidence of such striking circumstances 


121 


THE FATAL THREE. 


I as those in which your husband was con- 
cerned when he was Mr. Ransome.” 

“ I do not believe one word — and I hope I 
may never hear your voice again,” said Mil- 
dred, with her hand on the electric bell. 

She did not remove her hand till her serv- 
ant, the courier, opened the door. A look 
told him his duty, Castellani took up his hat 
without a word; and Albrecht deferentially 
attended him to the staircase, and politely 
whistled for the lift to convey him to the 
vestibule below. 

Castellani made the descent feeling like 
Lucifer when he fell from heaven. 

“Too soon, too soon!” he muttered to him- 
self. “ She took the cards out of my hands 
— she forced my hand, and spoiled my game. 
But I have given her something to think 
about. She will not forget to-day’s inter- 
view in a hurry.” 

Albrecht, the handiest of men, was stand- 
ing near him working the lift. 

‘ ‘ Where is your next move to be, Albrecht ?” 
he asked, in German. 

The noble-born lady had not yet decided, 
Albrecht told him; but he thought the move 
would be either to Davos, or to one of the 
villages on Lake Lucerne, 

“ If I pretended to be a prophet, Albrecht, 
I should tell thee that the honorable lady 
will go to neither Davos nor Lucerne; but 
that thy next move will be to the Riviera, 
perhaps Nice.” 

Albrecht shrugged his shoulders in polite 
indifference. 

‘ ‘ Look here, my friend, come thou to me 
when madame gives the order for Nice, and 
I will give thee a Louis for assuring me that 
I prophesied right,” said Castellani, as he 
stepped out of the lift, 

Mildred walked up and down the room, 
trying to control the wild confusion of her 
thoughts, trying to reason calmly upon that 
hideous accusation which she had affected 
to despise, but which yet had struck terror 
to her soul. Would he dare to bring such a 
charge— villain and traitor as he was — if 
there were not some ground for the accusa- 
tion, some glimmer of truth amid a cloud of 
falsehood? 

And her husband’s manner; his refusal to 
tell her the history of his first marriage; his 
reticence, his secrecy ; reticence so out of har- 
mony with his boldly truthful nature; the 


gloom upon his face when she forced him to 
speak of that past life— all these things came 
back upon her with appalling force,, and even 
the veriest trifles assumed a direful signifi- 
cance. / 

“Oh, my beloved, what was that dark 
story, and why did you leave me to hear it 
from such false lips as those?” 

And then with passionate tears she thought 
how easy it would have been to forgive and 
pity even a tale of guilt — unpremeditated 
guilt, doubtless, fatality rather than crime — 
if her husband had laid his weary head upon 
her breast and told her all, holding back 
nothing, confident in the strength of a great 
love to understand and to pardon. How 
much easier would it have been to bear the 
burden of a guilty secret, so shared, in the 
supreme trustfulness of her husband’s love! 
How light a burden compared with this 
which was laid upon her; this horror of 
darkly groping backward into the black night 
of the past! 

“I will know the worst,” she said to her- 
self, “I will test that scoundrel’s accusation. 
I must, must, must know ‘all.’ I will take 
no step to injure him, my best beloved. I 
will seek no help, trust no friend. I must 
act alone,” 

Then came another and more agonizing 
thought of the hapless wife — the victim. 

“My poor Fay, my loving sister, what was 
your fate? I must know.” 

Her thoughts came back always to that 
point — “I must know all.” 

She recalled the image of that unacknowl- 
edged sister, the face bending over her bed 
when she started up out of a feverish dream, 
frightened and in tears, to take instant com- 
fort from that loving presence, to fling her 
arms round Pay’s neck, and nestle upon her 
bosom. Never had that sisterly love failed 
her. The quiet watcher was always near. 
A sigh, a faint little murmur, and the volun- 
teer nurse was at her side. Often on waking 
she had found Fay sitting by her bed, in the 
dead of the night, motionless and watchful, 
sleepless from loving care. 

Her childish affection for Fay had been 
one of the strongest feelings of her life. She 
who had been all loving duty to the frivolous, 
capricious mother had yet unconsciously 
given a stronger love to the companion who 
had loved her with an unselfish devotion 


12^ 


THE EATAL three. 


which the mother had never shown. Her 
love for Fay had been the one romance of 
her childhood, and had continued the strong- 
est sentiment of her mind until the hour 
when for the first time she knew the deeper 
love of womanhood, and gave her heart to 
George Gres wold. 

And now these two supreme affections 
rose up before her in dreadful conflict; and 
in the sister so faithfully loved and so fondly 
regretted she saw the victim of her still dear- 
er husband. 

Pamela’s footsteps and Pamela’s voice in 
the corridor startled her in the midst of those 
dark thoughts. She hurriedly withdrew to 
her own room, where the maid Louisa was 
sitting intent upon one of those infinitesimal 
repairs which served as an excuse for her 
existence. 

“ Go and tell Miss Ransome that I cannot 
dine with her. My headache is worse than 
it was when she went out. Ask her to ex- 
cuse me.” 

Louisa obeyed, and Mildred locked the 
door upon her grief. She sat all through 
the long evening, brooding over the past and 
the future, impatient to know the worst. 

She was on her way to Nice with Pamela 
and their attendants before the following 
noon. Albrecht, the courier, had scarcely 
time to claim the proposed coin from Mr. 
Castellani. 

Miss Ransome repined at this sudden de- 
parture. 

“Just as we were going to be engaged,” 
she sobbed, when she and Mildred were 
alone in a railway compartment. “It is 
really unkind of you to whisk one off in such 
a way, aunt.” 

“My dear Pamela, you have had a very 
lucky escape, and I hope you will never men- 
tion Mr. Castellani’s name again. He is an 
utterly bad man.” 

“ How cruel to say such a thing — behind 
his back, too ! What has he done that is bad, 
I should like to know?” 

“I cannot enter into details; but I can 
tell you one thing, Pamela. He has never 
had any idea of asking you to be his wife. 
He told me that in the plainest language.” 

“Do you mean to say that you questioned 
him about his feelings — for me?” 

“I did what I felt was my duty, Pamela. 
My duty to you— and to your uncle.” 


“Duty!” ejaculated Pamela, with such an 
air that Box began to growl, imagining his 
mistress in want of protection. ,“ Duty ! 
It is the most hateful word in the whole of 
the English language. You asked him when 
he was going to propose to me — you lowered 
and humiliated me beyond all that words can 
say — you — you spoiled everything.” 

“Pamela, is this reasonable or just?” 

“To be asked when he was going to pro- 
pose to a girl — with his artistic temperament 
— the very thing to disgust him,” said Pa- 
mela, in a series of gasps. “If you had 
WANTED to part us forever you could not 
have gone to work better. ” 

“Whatever I wanted yesterday, I am 
quite clear about my feelings to-day, Pamela. 
It is my earnest hope that you and Mr. Cas- 
tellani will never meet again.” 

“You are very cruel, then — heartless — in- 
human. Because you have done with love — 
because you have left my poor uncle George 
— heaven alone knows why — is no one else 
to be happy?” 

“You could not be happy with Cesare Cas- 
tellani, Pamela, Happiness does not lie that 
way. I tell you again he is a bad man.” 

“And I tell you again I don’t believe you. 
In what way is he bad? Does he rob, mur- 
der, forge, set fire to people’s houses? What 
has he done that is bad?” 

“He has traduced your uncle — to me, his 
wife.” 

Pamela’s countenance fell. 

‘ ‘ Y ou— you may have misunderstood him,” 
she faltered. 

“No, he was plain enough. He slandered 
my husband. He let me see in the plainest 
way that he had no real regard for you, that 
he did not care how far his frequent visits 
compromised either you or me. He is utter- 
ly base and vile, Pamela, a man without rec- 
titude or conscience, or even gentlemanlike 
feeling. He would have clung to us like 
some poisonous burr if I had not shaken him 
off. My dear, dear child,” said Mildred, 
putting her arm round Pamela’s reluctant 
waist, and drawing the girlish figure nearer 
to her side, to the relief of Box, who leaped 
upon their shoulders and licked their faces 
in a rapture of sympathetic feeling, “my 
dear, you have been treated very badly, but 
I am not to blame. You have had a lucky 
I escape, Pamela. Why be angry about it?” 


133 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“It is all very well to talk like that,” 
sighed the girl, wrinkling her white forehead 
in painful perplexity. ‘ ‘ He was my day- 
dream. * One cannot renounce one’s day- 
dream at a moment’s warning. If you knew 
the castles I had built — a life spent with him 
— a life devoted to the cultivation of art. 
He would have made my voice, and we could 
have had a flat by Queen Anne’s Gate, and 
a brougham and victoria, and lived within 
our income,” concluded Pamela, following 
her own train of thought. 

“My dearest, there are so many worthier 
to share your life. You will have new day- 
dreams. ” 

“Perhaps, when I am sixty. It will take 
me a lifetime to forget him. Do you think 
I could marry a country bumpkin, or any 
one who was not artistic?” 

“You shall not be asked to marry a rus- 
tic. The artistip temperament is common 
enough nowadays. Almost every one is ar- 
tistic.” 

Pamela shrugged her shoulders petulant- 
ly, and turned to the window in token that 
she had said her say. She grieved like a 
child who has been disappointed of some 
jaunt looked forward to for long days of ex- 
pectation. She tried to think herself ill-used 
by her uncle’s wife ; and yet that common- 
sense, of which she possessed a considerable 
share, told her that she had only herself to 
blame. She had chosen to fall in love with 
a showy, versatile adventurer, without wait- 
ing for evidence that he cared for her. Proud 
in the strength of her position as an inde- 
pendent young woman with a handsome 
fortune and a fairly attractive person, she 
had imagined that Mr. Castellani could look 
no higher, hope for nothing better than to 
obtain her hand and heart. She had ascribed 
his reticence to delicacy. She had accepted 
his frequent visits as an evidence of his at- 
tachment, and of his ulterior views. 

And now she sat in a sulky attitude, coiled 
up in a corner of the carriage, with her face 
to the window, meditating upon her fool’s 
paradise. For seven happy weeks she had 
seen the man she admired almost daily, and 
her own intense sympathy with him had 
made her imagine an equal sympathy on his 
part. When their hands touched, the thrill- 
ing vibration seemed mutual; and yet it had 
been on her side only, poor fool, she told her- 1 


self now, abased and degraded in her own 
self-consciousness, drinking the cup of hu- 
miliation to the dregs. 

He had slandered her uncle— yes, that was 
baseness, that was iniquity. She began to 
think that he was utterly black. She re- 
membered how coldly cruel he had been 
about the hyacinth hunt yesterday ; how 
deaf to her girlish hints; never offering his 
company; colder, crueller than marble. She 
felt as if she had squandered her love upon 
Satan. Yet she was not the less angry with 
Mildred. That kind of interference was un- 
pardonable. 

She arrived at Nice worn out with a fa- 
tiguing journey, and in a worse temper than 
she had ever sustained for so long a period, 
she, whose worst tempers hitherto had been 
like April clouds. Mildred had reciprocated 
her silence, and Box had been the only ani- 
mated passenger. 

The clever courier had made all his ar- 
rangements by telegraph, and Mrs. Greswold 
and her companion were driven to one of the 
hotels on the Promenade des Anglais, where 
all preparations had been made for their re- 
ception — a glowing hearth in a pretty draw- 
ing-room opening on to a balcony, lamps and 
candles lighted, maid and man on the alert 
to receive travellers of distinction. So far 
as a place which is not home can put on an 
aspect of homeliness, the hotel had suc- 
ceeded ; but Mildred looked round upon the 
white and gold walls, and the satin fauteuils, 
with an aching heart, remembering those old 
rooms at Enderby, and the familiar presence 
that had first made them dear to her, before 
the habit of years had made those inanimate 
things a part of her life. 

She was at Nice : she had taken the slan- 
derer’s advice, and had gone to the City by the 
sea to try and trace out for herself the mys- 
tery of the past, to violate her husband’s se- 
cret, kept so long and so closely, to rise up 
after years of happiness and peace, like a 
murdered corpse exhumed from a forgotten 
grave. 

She was here on the scene of her husband’s 
first marriage, and for three or four days she 
wandered about, or drov6 about the strange 
busy place aimlessly, hopelessly, no nearer 
the knowledge of that dark history than she 
had been at Enderby Manor. Not for worlds 
would she injure the man she still fondly 


124 


THE FATAL THREE. 


loved. She wanted to know all; but the 
knowledge must be obtained in such a way 
as could not harm him. This necessitated 
diplomacy, which was foreign to her nature 
and patience, in which womanly quality she 
excelled. She had learned patience in her 
tender ministrations to a frivolous and often 
fretful invalid, during those sad slow years 
in which pretty Mrs. Fausset had faded into 
the grave. Yes, she had learned to be pa- 
tient and to submit to sorrow. She knew 
how to wait. 

The place, delightful as it was in the early 
spring weather, possessed no charms for her. 
Its gayety and movement jarred upon her. 
The sunsets were as lovely here as at Pal- 
lanza, and her only pleasure was to watch 
that ever-varying splendor of declining day 
behind the long dark promontory of Antibes; 
or to see the morning dawn in a flush of 
color above the white light-house of Ville- 
franche. St. Jean! It was there he had lived 
with his first wife — with Fay. The bright 
face, pale yet brilliant, a face in which light 
took the place of color; the eager eyes, the 
small sharp features and thin sarcastic lips, 
rose up before her with the thought of that 
union. He must have loved her. She was 
so bright, so interesting, so full of vivid feel- 
ings and changeful emotions. To this hour 
Mildred remembered her fascination, her 
power over a child’s heart. 

Pamela was dull and out of spirits. Not 
all the Tauchnitz novels .in Galignani’s shop 
could interest her. She pronounced Nice 
distinctly inferior to Brighton ; declined even 
the distraction of the opera. 

“Music would only make me miserable,” 
she exclaimed, petulantly. “ I wish I might 
never hear any again. That hateful band 
in the gardens tortures me every morning.” 

This was not hopeful. Mildred was sorry 
for her, but too deeply absorbed by her own 
griefs to be altogether sympathetic. 

“She will find some one else to admire 
before long,” she thought somewhat bitterly. 
“ Girls who fall in love so easily are easily 
consoled.” 

She had been at Nice more than a week, 
and had made no effort — yearning to know 
more — to know all — yet dreading every new 
revelation. She had to goad herseif to ac- 
tion, to struggle against the weight of a great 
fear—the fear that she might find the slan- 


derer’s accusations confirmed instead of be- 
ing refuted. 

Her first step was a very simple one, easy 
enough from a social point of view. Among 
old Lady Castle-Connell’s intimate friends 
had been a certain Irish chieftain called The 
O’Labacolly. The O’Labacolly’s daughter 
had been one of the reigning beauties of 
Dublin Castle, had appeared for a course of 
seasons in London with considerable {Hat, 
and ill due course had married a Scotch peer, 
who was lord of an extensive territory in the 
Highlands, and of a more profitable estate in 
the neighborhood of Glasgow. Lord Loch- 
invar had been laid at rest in the sepulchre 
of his forebears, and Lady Lochinvar was a 
rich widow, still handsome, and still young 
enough to enjoy all the pleasures of society. 
She had no children of her own, but she had 
a favorite nephew, whom she had adopted, 
and who acted as her escort in her travels, 
which were extensive, and as her steward in 
the management of the Glasgow property, 
in which she had a life interest. The High- 
land territory had gone with the title to a 
distant cousin of Lady Lochinvar’s husband. 

Mildred remembered that Castellan! had 
spoken of meeting Mr. Ransome and his wife 
at Lady Lochinvar’s palace at Nice. Her 
first step, therefore, was to make herself 
known to Lady Lochinvar, who had wintered 
in this fair white city ever since she came 
there as a young widow twenty years ago, 
and had bought for herself a fantastic villa, 
built early in the centurj'^ by an Italian prince, 
on the crest of a hill commanding the har- 
bor. 

With this view she wrote to Lady Lochin- 
var, recalling the old friendship between The 
O’Labacolly and Lady Castle-Connell, and 
introducing herself on the strength of that 
friendship. Lady Lochinvar responded with 
Hibernian warmth. She called at the West- 
minster Hotel that afternoon, and not finding 
Mfs. Greswold at home, left a note inviting 
her to breakfast at the Palais Montano next 
day. 

Mildred promptly accepted the invitation. 
She was anxious to be alone with Lady Loch- 
invar, and there seemed a better chance of a 
tete-d-tete at the lady’s house than at the ho- 
tel, where it would have been difficult to ex- 
clude Pamela. She drove to that fair hill on 
the eastward side of the city, turning her 


THE FATAL THREE. 


back upon the quaint old Italian town, with 
its narrow streets of tall houses, and its ca- 
thedral dome, with tiled roof glistening in 
the sunlight, like an inverted pudding-basin 
of red and yellow crockery. The two little 
semi -Moorish horses toiled slowly up the 
height with the great lumbering landau, car- 
rjing Mildred nearer and nearer to the bright 
blue sky, and the snow-line glittering on the 
edge of the maritime Alps. They went past 
villas and flower-gardens, hedges of pale and 
yellow roses, and hedges of coral-hued gera- 
niums, palms and orange-trees, shining ma- 
jolica tubs and white marble balustrades, 
statues and fountains, oriel - windows and 
Italian cupolas, turrets and towers of every 
order, while the sapphire sea dropped lower 
and lower beneath the chalky winding road, 
and the jutting promontory that shelters 
" Villefranche from the east wind came near- 
er and above the blue. 

The Palais Montano was almost the high- 
est of all the villas, and almost the farthest 
from Nice. The Italian prince had aspired 
after Oriental rather than classic beauty. His 
house was long and low, with two ranges of 
Moorish windows, and a dome at each end. 
There was an open loggia on the first floor, 
with a balustrade of white and colored mar- 
ble ; there was u gallery above the spacious 
tessellated hall, with a delicately carved san- 
dal-wood lattice behind which the beauties 
of a harem might be supposed to watch the 
entrances and exits below. The house was 
fantastic, but fascinating. The garden was 
the growth of more than half a century, and 
was supremely beautiful. 

Lady Lochinvar received the stranger with 
a cordiality which would have set Mildred 
thoroughly at her ease under happier circum- 
stances. As it was she was too completely 
engrossed by the object of her visit to feel 
any of that shyness which a person of retir- 
ing disposition might experience on such an 
occasion. She was grave and preoccupied, 
and it was with an effort that she responded 
to Lady Lochinvar’s allusions to the past. 

“Your mother and I were girls together,” 
she said, “at dear old Castle-Connell. My 
father’s place was within a drive of the cas- 
tle, but away from the river, and one of my 
first pleasant memories is of your grand- 
father’s gardens and the broad, bright Shan- 
non. What a river! When I look at our 


125 

[ stony torrent-beds here, and remember that 
I glorious Shannon !” 

I “Yet you like Nice better than County 
Limerick?” 

“Of course I do, my dear Mrs. Greswold. 
Ireland is a delicious country — to remember. 
I saw a good deal of your mother in London 
before his lordship’s death, but after I be- 
came a widow I went very little into Eng- 
lish society. I found English people so nar- 
row-minded. I only endured them for Loch- 
invar’s sake ; and after his death I became a 
rover. I have an apartment in the Champs 
Elysees, and another pied d terre in Rome; 
and now and then, when I want to drink a 
draught of commonplace, when I want to 
know what the hard-headed, practical British 
intellect is making of the world in general I 
give myself a week at Claridge’s. A week 
is always enough. So, you see, I have had 
no opportunity of looking up old friends.” 

“I never remember seeing you in Upper 
Parchment Street,” said Mildred. 

“ My dear, you were a baby at the time I 
knew your mother. I think you were just 
able to toddle across the drawing-room the 
day I bade her ^good-by, before I went to 
Scotland with Lochinvar — our last journey, 
poor dear man. He died the following win- 
ter.” 

The butler announced the dejeuner, and 
they went into an ideal dining-room, purely 
Oriental, with hangings of a dull pale pink 
damask, interwoven with lustreless gold, its 
only ornaments old Rhodes salvers shining 
with prismatic hues, its furniture of cedar 
and ebony. 

“lam quite alone to-day,” said Lady Loch- 
invar. “My nephew is driving to Monte 
Carlo by the Cornice road, and will not be 
back till dinner-time.” 

“I am very glad to be alone with you. 
Lady Lochinvar. I feel myself bound to tell 
you that I had an arriere-pensee in seeking 
your acquaintance, pleasant as it is to me to 
meet any friend of my poor mother’s girl- 
hood.” 

Lady Lochinvar looked surprised, and 
even a little suspicious. She began to fear 
some uncomfortable story. This sad-looking 
woman — such a beautiful face, but with such 
unmistakable signs of unhappiness. A run- 
away wife, perhaps; a poor creature who had 
fallen into disgrace and who wanted Lady 


126 


THE FATAL THREE. 


Locbinvar’s help to regain her position, or 
face her calumniators. Some awkward busi- 
ness, no doubt. Lady Lochinvar was gener- 
ous to a fault, but she liked showing kind- 
ness to happy people, she wanted smiling 
faces and serenity about her. She had never 
known any troubles of her own, worse than 
losing her husband whom she had married 
for his wealth and position, and saw no rea- 
son why she should be plagued with the 
troubles of other people. Her handsome 
countenance hardened ever so little as she 
answered, 

“If there is any small matter in which I 
can be of service to you — ” she began. 

“ It is not a small matter; it is a great mat- 
ter — to — to a friend of mine,” interrupted 
Mildred, faltering a little in her first attempt 
at dissimulation. 

Lady Lochinvar breathed more freely. 

“I shall be charmed to help your friend 
if I can.” 

The butler came in and out, assisted by an- 
other servant,, as the conversation went on, 
but as his mistress spoke to him and to his 
subordinate only in Italian, Mildred conclud- 
ed they knew very little English, and did not 
concern herself about their presence. 

“I want you to help me with your recol- 
lection of the past. Lady Lochinvar. You 
were at Nice seventeen years ago, I be- 
lieve?” , 

“ Between November and April, yes. I 
have spent those months here for the last 
twenty years.” 

“You remember a Mr. Ransome and his 
wife, seventeen years ago?” 

“Yes, I remember them distinctly. I can- 
not help remembering them.” 

‘ ‘ Have you ever met Mr. Ransome since 
that time?” 

“Never.” 

“And you have not heard anything about 
him?” 

“No, I have never heard of him since he 
left the asylum on the road to St. Andre. 
Good heavens, Mrs. Greswold, how white 
you have turned ! Pietro, some brandy this 
moment — ” 

“No, no! I am quite well— only a little 
shoeked, that is all. I had heard that Mr. 
Ransome was out of his mind at one time, 
but I did not believe my informant. It is 
really true, then?— he was once mad?” 


“Yes, he was mad— unless it was all a 
sham, a marvellously clever assumption.” 

“ Why should he have assumed madness?” 

Lady Lochinvar shrugged her portly shoul- 
ders, and lifted her finely arched eyebrows 
with a little foreign air which had grown 
upon her in foreign society. 

“To escape from a very awkward dilem- 
ma. He was arrested on suspicion of having 
killed his wife. The evidence against him 
was weak, but the circumstances of the poor 
thing’s death were very suspicious.” 

“ How did she die?” 

“ She threw herself or was thrown from 
a cliff on the other side of the promontory 
which you may see from that window.” 

“Might she not have fallen accidentally?” 

“That would have been hardly possible. 
It was a place where she had been in the 
habit of walking for weeks — a path which 
any stranger might walk upon in the day- 
light without the slightest danger — and the 
thing happened in broad day. She could not 
have fallen accidentally ; either she threw 
herself over, or he pushed her over in a mo- 
ment of ungovernable anger. She was a very 
provoking woman, and had a tongue which 
might goad a man to fury. I saw a good 
deal of her the winter before her death. She 
was remarkably clever, and she amused me. 

I had a kind of liking for her, and I used to 
let her tell me her troubles.” 

“What kind of troubles?” 

“ Oh, they all began and ended in one sub- 
ject. She was jealous— intolerably jealous — 
of her husband, suspected him of inconstan- 
cy to herself if he was commonly civil to a 
handsome woman. She watched him like a 
lynx, and did her utmost to make his life a 
burden to him, yet loved him passionately 
all the time in her vehement, wrongheaded 
manner.” 

“ Poor girl, poor girl!” murmured Mildred, 
with a stifled sob, and then she asked with in- 
tense earnestness, “But, Lady Lochinvar, you 
who knew George Ransome, surely you never 
suspected him of murder?” 

“ I don’t know, Mrs. Greswold. I believe 
he was a gentleman, and a man of an open, 
generous nature ; but upon my word I should 
be sorry to pledge myself to a positive belief 
in his innocence as to his wife’s death. Who 
can tell what a man might do, harassed and 
tormented as that man may have been by 


THE FATAL THREE. 


that woman’s tongue? I know what pesti- 
lential things she could say — what scorpions 
and adders dropped out of her mouth when 
she was in her jealous fits; and she may 
have gone just one step too far — walking by 
his side upon that narrow path — and he may 
have turned upon her, exasperated to mad- 
ness, and one push — and the thing was done. 
The edge of a cliff must be such an awful 
temptation under such circumstances,” added 
Lady Lochinvar, solemnly, “I’m sure I 
would not answer for myself in such a situ- 
ation.” 

“I will answer for 7im,” said Mildred, 
firmly. 

“You know him, then?” 

“Yes, I know him.”, 

“Where is he? What is he doing? Has 
he prospered in life?” 

“ Yes, and no. He was a happy man — or 
seemed to be happy — for thirteen years of 
married life, and then God’s hand was 
stretched out to aflflict him, and his onl}’- 
child was snatched away.” 

“He married again, then?” 

“Yes, he married a second wife, fourteen 
years ago. Forgive me. Lady Lochinvar, for 
having suppressed the truth jnst now. I 
wanted you to answer me more freely than 
you might have done had you known all at 
the outset. George Ransome is my husband ; 
he assumed the name of Greswold when he 
succeeded to his mother’s property.” 

“Then Mr, Greswold, your husband, is my 
old acquaintance. Is he with you here?” 

“ No. I have left him — perhaps forever.” 

“ On account of that past story?” 

“No, for another reason which is my sad 
secret, and his — a family secret. It involves 
no blame to him or me. It is a dismal fa- 
tality which parts us. You cannot suppose. 
Lady Lochinvar, that I could think my hus- 
band a murderer?” 

“A murderer, no. I do not believe any 
one ever thought him guilty of deliberate 
murder, but that he lost his temper with that 
unhappy girl, spurned her from him, flung 
her over the edge of the cliff — ” 

“ Oh no, no, no; it is not possible; I know 
him too well. He is not capable of a brutal 
act under the utmost provocation. No irri- 
tation, no sense of injury, could bring about 
such a change in his nature. Think, Lady 
Lochinvar. I have been his wife for four- 


127 

teen years. I must know what his character 
is like.” 

“ You know what he is in happy circum- 
stances, with an attached and confiding wife. 
You cannot imagine him goaded to madness 
by an unreasonable, hot-headed woman. 
You remember he was mad for nearly a year 
after his wife’s death. There must have been 
some sufficient reason for his madness.” 

“His wife’s wretched death, and the fact 
that he was accused of having murdered her, 
were enough to make him mad.” 

And then Mildred remembered how she 
had tortured her husband by her persistent 
questions about that terrible past; how in her 
jealousy of an unknown rival she too had 
goaded him almost as that first wife had 
goaded him. She recalled the look of pain, 
the mute protest against her cruelty, and she 
hated herself for the selfishness of her love. 

Lady Lochinvar was kind and sympathetic. 
She was not angry at the trap that had been 
set for her. 

“I can understand,” she said. “You 
wanted to know the worst, and you felt that 
I should be reticent if I knew you were Mr. 
Ransome’s wife. Well, I have said all the 
evil I can say about him. Remember, I know 
nothing except what other people thought 
and suspected. There was an inquiry about 
the poor thing’s death before the Juge d’ln- 
struction at Villefranche, and Mr. Ransome 
was kept in prison between the first and the 
second inquiry — and then it was discovered 
that the poor fellow had gone off his head, 
and he vras taken to the asylum. He had no 
relations in the neighborhood, nobody inter- 
ested in looking after him. His acquaint- 
ance in Nice knew very little about him or 
his wife, even when they were living at a ho- 
tel on the Promenade des Anglais, and going 
into society. After they left Nice they lived 
in seclusion at St. Jean, and avoided all their 
acquaintance. Mrs. Ransome’s delicate health 
was a reason Tor retirement, but it may not 
have been the only reason. There was no 
one, therefore, to look after the poor man in 
his misfortunes. He was just hustled away 
to the mad-house— the inquiry fell through 
for want of evidence — and for six months 
George Ransome was buried alive. I was in 
Paris at the time, and only heard the story 
when I came back to Nice in the following 
November. Nobody could tell me what had 


128 


THE FATAL THREE. 


become of Mr. Ransome, and it was only by 
accident that I heard of his confinement in 
the asylum some time after he had been re- 
leased as a sane man.” 

“Did his wife ever talk to you of her own 
history?” 

“Never. She was very fond of talking to 
me about her husband’s supposed inconstan- 
cy, and the mistake she had made in marry- 
ing a man who had never cared for her, but 
about her own people and her own antece- 
dents she was silent as the grave. In a place 
like Nice, where everybody is idle, there is 
sure to be a good deal of gossip, and we all 
had our own ideas about Mrs. Ransome. We 
put her down as the natural daughter of some 
person of importance, or at any rate of good 
means. She had her own fortune, and was 
entirely independent of her husband, who 
was not a rich man at that time.” 

“ No, it was his mother’s death that made 
him rich. But you did not think he had 
married for money?” 

“No, our theory was that he had been 
worried into marrying. We thought the lady 
had thrown herself at his head, and that all 
her unhappiness sprang from her knowledge 
that she had in a measure forced him to mar- 
ry her.” 

“ Do you remember the name of the house 
at St. Jean where they lived when they left 
Nice?” 


“Yes, I called there once, but as Mrs. 
Ransome never returned my call, I conclud- 
ed that they wished to drop their Nice ac- 
quaintance, and I heard afterwards that they 
were living like hermits in a cave. The house 
is a low white villa, spread out along the edge 
of a grassy ridge, with a broad stone terrace 
on one side, and a garden and orchard on the 
other. It is called ‘ Au Bout du Monde.’ ” 

“lam very grateful to you. Lady Lochin- 
var, for having been frank with me. I will 
go and look at the house where they lived. 
I may find some one, perhaps, who knew 
them.” 

“You want to make further inquiries?” 

“I want to find some one who is as con- 
vinced of my husband’s guiltlessness as I 
am.” 

“ That will be dilficult. There was very 
little evidence for or against him. The hus- 
band and wife went out to walk together one 
April afternoon. They left the house in 
peace and amity, as it seemed to their serv- 
ants; but some ladies who met and talked to 
them an hour afterwards thought b}’’ Mrs. 
Ransome’s manner that there was some cool- 
ness between her and her husband. When 
she was next seen she was lying at the foot 
of a cliff, dead. That is all that is known of 
the tragedy. You could hardly hang a man 
or acquit him upon such evidence. It is a 
case of not proven.” 


CHAPTER VIII. 

LOOKING BACK. 


Lady Lochinvar offered to drive Mrs. 
Greswold to St. Jean that afternoon. Her 
villa was half way between Nice and Ville- 
franche, and half an hour’s drive would have 
taken them to the Bout du Monde; but Mil- 
dred preferred to make her explorations 
alone. There was too much heartache in 
such an investigation to admit of sympathy 
or companionship. “You are all goodness to 
me, dear Lady Lochinvar,” she said, “and I 
may come to you again for help before I 
have done ; but I would rather tread the 
scene of my husband’s tragedy alone, quite 
alone. You cannot tell how sad the story is 
to me, even apart from my love for him. I 


may be able to confide in you more fully 
some day perhaps. ” 

Lady Lochinvar kissed her at parting. 
She did not care for commonplace trouble; 
she could not sympathize with stupid family 
quarrels or shortness of money, or any of 
the vulgar trivialities about which people 
worry their friends; but a romantic sorrow, 
a tragedy with a touch of mystery in it, was 
full of interest for her. And then Mildred 
was a graceful and subdued sufferer, not hys- 
terical or tiresome in any way. 

“I will do anything in the world that I 
can for you,” she said. 

“Will you let me bring my husband’s 


THE FATAL THREE. 


129 


niece to see you?” asked Mildred. “She 
has a dull time with me, poor girl, and I 
think you would like her.” 

“ She shall come to me this evening if she 
has nothing better to do,” said Lady Lochin- 
var. “ I am fond of young people, and will 
do my best to amuse her. I shall send my 
carriage for her at half-past seven.” 

“That is more than kind. I shall be glad 
for the poor girl to get a glimpse of some- 
thing brighter than our perpetual Ute-d-tete. 
But there is one thing I ought to speak about 
before you see her. I think you know some- 
thing of an Italian called Castellani, a man 
who is both musical and literary,” 

“Yes, I have heard of Mr. Castellani’s 
growing fame. He has written rather a 
clever book, has he not?, I knew him years 
ago — it was in the same winter we have been 
talking about. He used to come to my par- 
ties. Do you know him?” 

“He has been a visitor at Enderby — my 
husband’s house — and I have seen something 
of him in Italy of late. I am sorry to say he 
has made a very strong impression upon my 
niece’s heart— or upon her imagination — but 
as I know him to be a worthless person, I 
am deeply anxious that her liking for him 
should — ” 

“ Die a natural death, I understand,” in- 
terrupted Lady Lochinvar. “You may be 
sure I will not encourage the young lady to 
talk of Mr. Castellani.” 

Mildred explained her responsibility with 
regard to Pamela, and the young .lady’s posi- 
tion, with its substantial attraction for the 
adventurer in search of a wife. She had 
deemed it her duty to confide thus much 
in Lady Lochinvar, lest Castellani should 
change his tactics, and pursue Pamela with 
addresses which might be only too readily 
accepted. 

She left the Palais Montano at two o’clock, 
and drove round the bay to St. Jean, where 
the rose hedges were in flower, and where 
the gardens were bright with bloom under a 
sky which suggested an English June. 

She left the fly at the little inn where the 
holiday people go to eat bouillabaisse on 
Sundays and f§te days, but which was silent 
and solitary to-day, and then walked slowly 
along the winding road, looking for the Bout 
du Monde. The place was prettier and 
more rustic, after an almost English fashion, 


than any spot she had seen since she left 
Enderby. Villas and cottages were scatter- 
ed in a desultory way upon different levels, 
under the shelter of precipitous cliffs, and in 
every bit of rising ground and in every hol- 
low there were orange and lemon groves, 
with here and there a peach or a cherry tree 
in full bloom, and here and there a vivid 
patch of flowers, and here and there a wall 
covered with the glowing purple of the bou- 
gainvilliers. Great carouba-trees rose tall 
and dark amid all this brightness, and through 
evety opening in the foliage the azure of the 
tideless sea shone in the distance like the 
jasper sea of the Apocalypse. 

Mildred went slowly along the dusty road, 
looking at all the , villas, lingering here and 
there at a garden gate, and asking any intel- 
ligent-looking person who passed to direct 
her to the Bout du Monde. It was not till she 
had made the inquiry half a dozen times that 
she obtained any information, but at last she 
met with a bright -faced market-woman 
tramping home with empty baskets after a 
long morning at Nice, and white with the 
dust of the hill-side. 

“Au Bout du Monde, but that was the 
villa where the poor young English lady 
lived whose husband threw her over the 
cliff,” said the wmman, cheerily. “ The pro- 
prietor changed the name of the house next 
season, for fear people should fancy it was 
haunted if the story got about. It is called 
Montfleuri now.” 

“Is there any one living there?” Mildred 
asked. 

No, it was let to an English family. Oh, 
but an amiable family, riche, ah, but richissi- 
me, who had bought flowers in heaps of the 
speaker. But they had left, malheureusinent. 
They had returned to their property near 
London, a great and stupendous property in 
a district which the flower-woman described 
as le Commu-elle Rodd. There had never 
been such a family in St. Jean — five English 
servants, three English mees who mounted 
on horseback daily, a benefaction for the 
whole village. Now, alaal there was no one 
living iu the house but an old woman in 
charge. 

“ Could you take me to the house?” asked 
Mildred, opening her purse. 

The woman would have been all politeness 
and good -nature without the stimulant oL 


130 


THE FATAL THREE. 


fered by that open purse. She had all the 
Southern kindliness and alacrity to oblige, 
but when the lady dropped half a dozen 
francs into her broad brown hand she almost 
sank to the earth in a rapture of gratitude. 

“ Madame shall see the house from garret 
to cellar if she wishes,” she exclaimed. “I 
know the old woman in charge. She is as 
deaf as one of those stones yonder,” pointing 
to a block of blue-gray stone lying amid the 
long rank grass upon the shelving ground be- 
tween the road and the sea; “ but if mac^me 
will permit I will show her the house. Ma- 
dame is perhaps interested in the story of that 
poor lady who was murdered?” 

“ Why do you say that she was murdered?” 
asked Mildred, indignantly. “You cannot 
know.” 

The woman shrugged her shoulders with 
a dubious air. 

Mais, madame, nobody but the good 
'God can know; but most of us thought that 
the Englishman pushed his wife over the 
cliff. They did not live happily together. 
Their cook was a cousin of mine, a young 
woman who went regularly to confession, 
and would not have spoken falsely for all the 
world, and she told me there was great un- 
happiness between them. The wife was of- 
ten in tears; the husband was often angry.” 

“But he was never unkind. Your cousin 
must know that he was never unkind.” 

“Alas! my cousin lies in the same burial- 
ground yonder with the poor lady,” answered 
the woman, pointing to the white crest of the 
hill, where the soldiers were being drilled in 
the dusty barrack yard under the cloudless 
blue. “ She is no more here to tell the story. 
But no, she did not say the husband was un- 
kind ; he was grave and sad ; he was not hap- 
py. Tears, tears and reproaches, sad words 
from her, day after day ; and from him silence 
and gloom. Poor people like us, who work 
for our bread, have no leisure for that kind 
of unhappiness. ‘ I would rather stand over 
my casseroles than sit in a salon and cry,’ 
said my cousin.” 

“It is cruel to say he caused her death, 
when you know he was never unkind to her,” 
said Mildred, as they walked side by side; ‘ ‘ a 
patient, forbearing husband does not become 
a murderer all at once.” 

“ Ah, but continual dropping will wear a 
Stone, madame. She may have tried him too 


much with her tears. He went out of his 
mind after her death. Would he have gone 
mad, do you think, if he had not been guilty ?” 

“He was all the more likely to go mad, 
knowing himself innocent and finding him- 
self accused of a dreadful crime. ” 

“Well, I cannot tell; I know most of us 
thought he had pushed her over the cliff. I 
know the young man who was their gardener 
said if he had had a wife with that kind of 
temper he would have thrown her down the 
well in his garden.” 

They were at the Villa Montfleuri by this 
time, a long, low white house with a stone 
terrace overlooking the harbor of Ville- 
franche. The woman opened the gate and 
Mildred followed her into the garden and to 
the terrace, upon which the principal rooms 
opened. There was a latticed veranda in 
front of the salon and dining-room, over 
which roses and geraniums were trained, 
and above which the purple bougainvilliers 
spread its vivid bloom. The orange - trees 
grew thick in the orchard, at the end of which 
there was the tomb-shaped well of the South, 
the well down which the gardener said he 
would have thrown a discontented wife. 

The care-taker was not in the house, but all 
the doors were open. Mildred went from 
room to room. The furniture was the same 
as it had been seventeen years ago, the wom- 
an told Mildred — furniture of the period of 
the First Empire, shabby, and with the air of 
a house that is let to strangers year after year, 
and in which nobody takes any interest. The 
clocks on the mantle-pieces were all silent, 
the vases M^ere all empty, everything had a 
dead look. Only the view from the windows 
was beautiful with an inexhaustible beauty. 

Mildred lingered in the faded salon, look- 
ing at everything with a strange and melan- 
choly interest. Those two familiar images 
were with her in the room. She pictured 
them sitting there together, yet so far apart 
in the bitter lack of sympathy — a wife tor- 
mented by jealous suspicions, no less agoniz- 
ing because they were groundless — a husband 
long-suffering, weary, with his little stock of 
marital love worn out under slow torture. 
She could see them as they might have been 
in those by-gone years. George Greswold’s 
dark, strong face, younger than she had ever 
known it; for when he first came to her fa- 
1 ther’s house there had been threads of gray 


131 


THE FATAL THREE. 


in his dark hair, premature streaks of silver, 
which seemed strange in so young a man. 
She could understand now how those touches 
of gray had come in the thick, wavy hair that 
clustered close on the broad, strongly marked 
brow. There were premature wrinkles too 
which told of early care. 

Poor Fay ! poor, poor, loving, impulsive 
Fay! 

Child as she had been in those old days in 
Parchment Street, Mildred had a vivid con- 
ception of her young companion’s character. 
She remembered the quick temper, the sen- 
sitive self-esteem, which had taken offence 
at the mere suggestion of slight ; she remem- 
bered dark hours of brooding melancholy 
when the girl had felt the sting of her isolated 
position, had fancied herself a creature apart, 
neglected and scorned by Mrs. Fausset and 
her butterfly visitors. For Mildred she had 
been always overflowing with love, and she 
had never doubted the sincerity of Mildred’s 
affection ; but with all the rest of the house- 
hold, with every visitor who noticed her cold- 
ly, or frankly ignored her, she was on the 
alert for insult and offence. Remembering 
all this, Mildred could fully realize Lady 
Lochinvar’s account of that unhappy union. 
A woman so constituted would be satisfied 
with nothing less than a passionate, all-ab- 
sorbing love from the man she loved. 

The rooms and the garden were haunted 
by those mournful shades — two faces pale 
with pain. She, too, had suffered those sharp 
stings of jealousy, jealousy of a past love, 
jealousy of the dead' and she knew how keen- 
er than all common anguish is that agony of 
a woman’s heart which yearns for sovereign 
possession over past, present, and future in 
the life of the man she loves. 

The market-woman sat out in the sunshine 
on the terrace, and waited while Mildred 
roamed about the garden, picturing that van- 
ished life at every step. There was the ber- 
ceau, the delight of a Southern garden, a long, 
green alley, arched with osiers, over which 
the brown vine-branches make a net-work, 
open to the sunlight and the blue sky now, 
while the vine was still leafless, but in sum- 
mer-time a place of coolness and green leaves. 
There was the fountain — or the place where 
a fountain had once been, and a stone bench 
beside it. They had sat there perhaps on 
sunny mornings, sat there and talked of their 


future, full of hope. They could not have 
been always unhappy. Fay must have had 
her bright hours ; and then, no doubt, she was 
dear to him, full of a strange- fascination, a 
creature of quick wit and vivid imagination, 
light and fire embodied in a fragile earthy 
tenement. 

The sun was nearing the dark edge of the 
promontory when Mildred left the garden, 
the woman accompanying her, waiting upon 
her footsteps, sympathizing with her pensive 
mood, with that exquisite instinctive polite- 
ness of the Southern, which is almost as great 
a delight to the stranger from the hard, cold, 
practical North as the color of the Southern 
sea, or the ever-varying beauty of the hills 
that look upon it. 

“Will you show me the place where the 
English lady fell over the cliff?” Mildred 
asked, and the woman went with her along 
the winding road through the mild, sum- 
mery air of Southern spring-time, and then 
upward to a path along the crest of a cliff, a 
cliff that seemed low on account of the bold- 
er heights which rose above it, and which 
screened this eastward-fronting shore of the 
little peninsula from all the world of the 
west. The'^ad wound westward up to the 
higher ground, and Mildred and her guide 
followed a foot-path which had been trodden 
on the long, rank grass. The rosemary-bushes 
were full of flower — pale, cold gray blossoms, 
as befitted the herb of death — and a great 
yellow weed made patches of vivid color 
here and there among the blue-gray stones 
scattered in the long grass. 

“It was somewhere along this path-way, 
madame,” said the woman. “ I cannot tell 
you the exact spot. Some fishermen from 
Beaulieu picked her up,” pointing across the 
blue water of the bay to a semicircle of 
yellow sand, with a few white houses scat- 
tered along the curving road, and some boats 
lying keel upward on the beach. “She 
never spoke again; she was dead when they 
found her there.” 

“ Did they see her fall?” 

“No, madame.” 

“And yet people have dared to call her 
husband a murderer.” 

“ Ah, but madame, it was the general opin- 
ion. Was it not his guilty conscience that 
drove him mad? He came here once only 
after he left the mad-house, wandered about 


133 


THE FATAL THREE. 


the village for an hour or two, went up to 
the cemetery and looked once — but once only 
— at the poor lady’s grave, and then drove 
away as if devils were hunting him. Who 
can doubt that it was his hand that sent her 
to her death?” 

“No one who knew him would believe it.” 

“Everybody at St. Jean believed it; even 
the people who liked him best.” 

Mildred turned from her sick at heart. 
She gave the woman some more money, and 
then with briefest adieu walked back to the 
inn where she had left the carriage, and 
where the horse was dozing with his nose in 
a bag of dried locust fruit, while his driver 
sprawled half asleep upon the rough stone 
parapet between the inn and the bay. 

Pamela received her aunt graciously on her 
return to the hotel, and seemed in better spir- 
its than she had been since she left Pallanza. 

“ Your Lady Lochinvar has written me the 
sweetest little note, asking me to dine with 
her and go to the opera afterwards,” she said. 
“I feel sure this must be your doing, aunt.” 

“No, dear. I only told her that I had a 
very nice niece moping at the hotel, and very 
tired of niy dismal company.” 

“Tired of you? No, no, aunt. You know 
better than that. I should no more grow 
tired of you than I should of Box,” intending 
to make the most flattering comparison; 
“only he had made himself a part of our 
lives at Pallanza, and one could not help 
missing him.'’ (The pronoun meant Mr. 
Castellani, and not the dog.) “I am glad I 
am going to the opera after all, even if it 
does remind me of him; and it’s awfully 
kind of Lady Lochinvar to send her carriage 
for me. I only waited to see you before I 
began to dress.” 

“ Go, dearest; and take care to look your 
prettiest.” 

“ And you won’t mind dining alone?” 

‘ ‘ I shall be delighted to know you are en- 
joying yourself.” 

The prospect of an evening’s solitude was 
an infinite relief to Mildred. She breathed 
more freely when Pamela had gone dancing 
off to the lift, a fluffy, feathery mass of white- 
ness, with hooded head and rosy face peeping 
out of white fox fur. The tall door of the 
salon closed upon her with a solemn rever- 
beration, and Mildred was alone with her own 
thoughts, alone with the history of her hus- 


band’s past life, now that she had unravelled 
the tangled skein and knew all. 

She was face to face with the past, and 
how did it seem in her eyes? Was there no 
doubt, no agonizing fear that the man she 
had loved as a husband might have slain the 
girl she had loved as a sister? All those 
people, those simple and disinterested vil- 
lagers, who had liked George Ransome well 
enough for his own sake, had yet believed 
him guilty ; they who had been on the spot, 
and had had the best opportunities for judg- 
ing the case rightly. 

Could she doubt him, she who had seen 
honor and fine feeling in every act of his 
life? She remembered the dream — that ter- 
rible dream which had occurred at intervals, 
sometimes once in a year, sometimes much 
oftener; that awe-inspiring dream which had 
shaken the dreamer’s nerves as nothing but 
a vision of horror could have shaken them, 
from which he had awakened more dead 
than alive, completely unnerved, cold drops 
upon his pallid brow, his hands convulsed 
and icy, his eyes glassy as death itself. The 
horror of that dream, even to her who beheld 
its effects in the dreamer, was a horror not 
to be forgotten. 

Was it the dream of a murderer, acting his 
crime over again in that dim world of sleep, 
living over again the moment of his tempta- 
tion and his fall? No, no! Another might 
so interpret the vision, but not his wife. 

“I know him,” she repeated to herself, 
passionately. 

“I know him. I know his noble heart. 
He is incapable of one cruel impulse. He 
could not have done such a deed. There is 
no possible state of feeling, no moment of 
frenzy, in which he would have been false 
to his character and his manhood.” 

And then she asked herself if Fay had not 
been her sister, if there had not been that in- 
surmountable bar to her union with George 
Greswold, vrould her knowledge of his first 
wife’s fate and the suspicion that had dark- 
ened his name, would that have parted them? 
Could she, knowing what she now knew, 
knowing that he had been so suspected, that 
it was beyond his power ever to prove his 
guiltlessnes’s, could she have gone through 
the rest of her life with him, honoring him, 
and trusting him as she had done in the years 
that were gone? 


THE FATAL THREE. 


133 


She told herself that she could have so 
trusted him; that she could have honored 
and loved him to the end, pitying him for 
those dark experiences, but with faith un- 
shaken. 

“A murderer and a madman,” she said 
to herself, repeating Castellani’s calumny. 
“Murderer I would never believe him; and 
shall I honor him less because that sensitive 
mind was plunged in darkness by the hor- 
ror of his wife’s fate?” 

Pamela came home before midnight. Lady 
Lochinvar had driven her to the door. She 
was in high spirits, and charmed with her 
ladyship, and thought her ladyship’s neph- 
ew, Mr, Stuart, late of the Forty-second High- 
landers, a rather agreeable person. 

“ He is decidedly plain,” said Pamela, “ and 
looks about as intellectual as Sir Henry 
Mountford, and he evidently doesn’t care a 
jot for music; but he has very pleasant man- 
ners, and he told me a lot about Monte Car- 
lo. A brother officer of his, bronchial, with 
a very nice wife, came to Lady Lochinvar’s 
box in the evening, and she is going to call 
for me to-morrow afternoon to take me to 
the tennis ground at the Cercle de la Mediter- 
ranee, if you don’t mind.” 

“My dearest, you know I wish only to see 
you happy and with nice people. I suppose 
this lady, whose name you have not yet told 
me — ” 

“Mrs. Murray. She is very Scotch, but 
quite charming — nothing fast or rowdy about 
her — and devoted to her invalid husband. 
He does not play tennis, poor fellow, but sits 
in the sun and looks on.” 

Mrs. Murray made her appearance at two 
o’clock next day, and Mildred was pleased 
to find that Pamela had not exaggerated her 
merits. She was very Scotch, and talked of 
Lady Lochinvar as “ a purpose woman,” with 
a Caledonian roll of the r in purpose which 
emphasized the word in its adjectival sense. 
She had very pretty simple manners, and 
was altogether the kind of young matron 
with whom a feather-headed girl might be 
trusted. 

Directly Pamela and her new friend had 
departed, Mildred put on her bonnet and 
went out on foot. She had made certain in- 
quiries through Albrecht, and she knew the 
way she had to go upop the pilgrimage on 
which she was bent, a pilgrimage of sorrow- 


ful memory. There was a relief in being 
quite alone upon the long parade between 
the palm-trees and the sea, and to know that 
she was free from notice and sympathy for 
the rest of the afternoon. 

She walked to the Place Massena, and there 
accepted the beseeching offers of one of the 
numerous fly-men, and took her seat in afigrht 
victoria behind a horse which lookec^^nittle 
better fed than his neighbors. She told the 
man to drive along the west bankl^)f the Pail- 
lon, on the road to St. Andre. 

Would not madame go to St. Andre, and 
see the wonderful grotto, and the petrifac- 
tions? 

No, madame did not wish to go as far as 
St. Andre. She would tell the driver where 
to stop. 

The horse rattled off at a brisk pace. They 
are no crawlers, those flys of the South. They 
drove past the smart shops and hotels upon 
the quay ; past the shabby old inn where the 
diligences put up, a hostelry with suggest- 
ions of the past when the old Italian town 
was not a winter rendezvous for all the na- 
tions, the beaten track of Yankee and cock- 
ney, Calicote and counter-jumper, Russian 
prince and Hebrew capitalist, millionaire and 
adventurer. They drove past the shabby 
purlieus of the town, workmen’s lodging- 
houses, sordid-looking shops, then an orange 
garden here and there within crumbling plas- 
ter walls, and here and there a tavern in a 
shabby garden. To the left of the river, on 
a sharp pinnacle of hill, stood the Monastery 
of Cimies, with dome and tower dominating 
the landscape. Farther away on the other 
side of the stony torrent-bed rose the rugged 
chain of hills stretching away ito Mentone 
and the Italian frontier, and high up against 
the blue sky glimmered the white domes of 
the Observatory. They came by-and-by to a 
spot where by the side of the broad, high 
road there was a wall, enclosing a white 
dusty yard, and behind it a long white house 
with many windows, bare and barren, star- 
ing blankly at the dry bed of the torrent and 
the rugged brown hills beyond. At each end 
of the long white building there was a colon- 
nade with iron bars, open to the sun and the 
air, and as Mrs. Greswold’s carriage drew 
near a man’s voice rolled out the opening 
bars of “Ah, che la morte,” in a tremendous 
barytone. A cluster of idlers had congre- 


134 


THE FATAL THREE. 


gated about tbe open gate, to stare and listen, 
for the great white house was a mad-house, 
and the grated colonnades right and left of 
the long fa9ade were the recreation-grounds 
of the insane— of those worst patients who 
could not be trusted to wander at their ease 
in the garden, or to work upon the breezy 
hills towards St. Andre. 

The sioger was a fine-looking man, dressed 
in loose garments of some white material, and 
with long white gloves. He flung himself 
on to an upper bar of the grating with the 
air of an athlete, and hung upon the bars 
with his gloved hands, facing that cluster of 
loafers as if they had been an audience in a 
theatre, and singing with all the power of a 
Herculean physique. Mildred told her driver 
to stop at the gate, and she sat listening while 
the madman sang, in fitful snatches of a few 
bars at a time, but with never a false note. 

That cage, and the patients pacing up and 
down, or hanging on to the bars, or standing 
staring at the gate and little crowd, moved 
her to deepest pity, touched her with keen- 
est pain. He had been here, her beloved, in 
that brief interval of darkest night. She re- 
called how in one of his awakenings from 
that torturing dream he had spoken words of 
strange meaning — or of no meaning as they 
had seemed to her then. 

“ The cage — the cage again," he had cried 
in an agonized voice; “iron bars — like a wild 
beast.” , 

These words had been an enigma to her 
then. She saw the answer to the riddle here. 

She sat for some time watching that sad 
spectacle, hearing those broken snatches of 
song, with intervals of silence, or sometimes 
a wild peal of laughter between. 

The loiterers were full of speculations and 
assertions. The porter at the gate answered 
some questions, turned a deaf ear to others. 

The singer was a Spanish nobleman who 
had lost a fortune at Monte Carlo the night 
before, and had been brought here bound 
hand and foot at early morning. He had 
tried to kill himself, and now he fancied him- 
self a famous singer, and that the barred col- 
onnade was the stage of the Grand Opera at 
Paris. 

“He’ll soon be all right again,” said the 
porter, with a careless shrug; “those violent 
cases mend quickly.” 

“But he won’t get his money back again. 


poor devil,” said one of the loiterers, a fly- 
man whose vehicle was standing by the wall 
waiting for a customer. ‘ ‘ Hard to recover 
his senses and find himself without a sou.” 

“Oh, he has rich friends no doubt. Look 
at his white kid gloves. He is young and 
handsome, and he has a splendid voice. 
Somebody will take care of him. Do you 
see that old woman sitting over there in the 
garden? You would not think there was any- 
thing amiss with her, would you? No more 
there is, only she thinks she is the Blessed 
Virgin. She has been here five-and-thirty 
years. Nobody pities her — nobody inquires 
about her. My father remembers her when 
she was a handsome young woman at a 
flower -shop on the Quay Massena, one of 
j the merriest girls in Nice. Somebody told 
her she was neglecting her soul and going to 
I hell. This set her thinking too much. She 
1 used to be at the cathedral all day, and at 
I confession as often as the priest would liear 
her. She neglected her shop, and quarrelled 
with her mother and sisters. She said she 
had a vocation; and then one fine day she 
walked to the cathedral in a white veil, with 
a branch of lilies in her hand, and she told 
all the people she met that they ought to 
kneel before her and make the sign of the 
cross, for she was the Mother of God. Three 
days afterwards her people brought her here. 
She would neither eat nor drink, and she 
never closed her eyes, or left off talking about 
her glorious mission, which was to work the 
redemption of all the women upon earth.” 

“ Drive on to the doctor’s house,” Mildred 
said, presently, and the fly went on a few 
hundred yards, and then drew up at the door 
of a private house, which marked the boun- 
j dary of the asylum garden. 

Mrs. Greswold had inquired the name of 
the doctor of longest experience in the asy- 
lum, and she had been referred to Monsieur 
Leroy, the inhabitant of this house, where 
the fly-man informed her some of the more 
wealthy patients were lodged. She had come 
prepared with a little note requesting the fa- 
vor of an interview, and enclosing her card, 
with the address of Enderby Manor, as well 
as her hotel in Nice. The English manor 
and the Hotel Westminster indicated at least 
respectability in the applicant; and Monsieur 
Leroy’s reception was both prompt and cour- 
teous. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


135 


He was a clever-looking man, about sixty 
years of age, with a fine benevolent head and 
an attentive eye, as of one always on the 
alert. He had spent five-and-thirty of his 
sixty years in the society of the deranged, 
and had devoted all his intellectual power to 
the study of mental disease. 

After briefest preliminary courtesies, Mil- 
dred explained the purpose of her visit. 

‘ ‘ I am anxious to learn anything you can 
tell me about a patient who was under your 
care — or at least in this establishment — seven- 
teen years ago, and in whom I am deeply 
interested,” she said. 

“Seventeen years is a longish time, ma- 
dame, but I have a longish memory, and I 
keep notes of all my cases. I may be able 
to satisfy your curiosity in some measure. 
What was the name of this patient?” 

“ He was an Englishman called Ransome 
— George Ransome. He was placed here 
under peculiar circumstances.” 

“Corpo di Baccho ! I should say they were 
peculiar — very peculiar circumstances !” ex- 
claimed the doctor. “ Do you know, madame, 
that Mr. Ransome came here as a suspected 
murderer? He came straight from the jail at 
Villefranche, where he had been detained on 
the suspicion of having killed his wife.” 

“There was not one jot of evidence to 
support such a charge. I know all the cir- 
cumstances. Surely, sir, you, who must have 
a wide knowledge of human nature, did not 
think him guilty?” 

“I hardly made up my mind upon that 
point, even after I had seen him almost every 
day for six months; but there is one thing 
I do know about this unhappy gentleman. 
His lunacy was no assumption, put on to save 
him from the grip of the law. He was a man 
of noble intellect, large brain power, and for 
the time being his reason was totally obscured.” 

‘ ‘ To what cause did you attribute the 
attack?” 

“A long course of worry, nerves complete- 
ly shattered, and finally the shock of that 
catastrophe on the cliff. Whether his hand 
pushed her to her death, or the woman flung 
her life away, the shock was too much for 
Mr. Ransome’s weakened and worried brain. 
All the indications of his malady, from the 
most violent stages to the gradual progress 
of recovery, pointed to the same conclusion. 
The history of the case revealed its cause 


and its earlier phases: an unhappy marriage, 
a jealous wife, patience and forbearance on 
his part, until patience degenerated into de- 
spair, the dull apathy of a wearied intellect. 
All that is easy to understand.” 

“ You pitied him, then, monsieur?” 

“Madame, I pity all my patients; but I 
found in Mr. Ransome a man of exceptional 
characteristics, and his case interested me 
deeply.” 

“You would not have been interested had 
you believed him guilty?” 

“ Pardon me, madame; crime is full of in- 
terest for the pathologist. The idea that this 
gentleman might have spurned his wife from 
him in a moment of aberration would not 
have lessened my interest in his mental condi- 
tion. But although I have never made up my 
mind upon the question of his guilt or inno- 
cence, I am bound to tell you, since you 
seem even painfully interested in his history, 
that his conduct after his recovery indicated 
an open and generous nature, a mind of pe- 
culiar refinement, and a great deal of chiv- 
alrous feeling. I had many conversations 
with him during the period of returning rea- 
son, and I formed a very high opinion of his 
moral character.” 

‘ ‘ Did other people think him guilty — the 
people he had known in Nice, for instance?” 

“I fancy there were very few who 
thought much about him,” answered the doc- 
tor. “ Luckily for him and his belongings 
— whoever they might be — he had dropped 
out of society for some time before the catas- 
trophe, and he had never been a person of 
importance in Nice. He had not occupied 
a villa, or given parties. He lived with his 
wife at a hotel, and the man who lives at a 
hotel counts for very little on the Riviera, 
lie is only a casual kind of visitor, who may 
come and go as he pleases. His movements 
— unless he has rank or fashion, or inordi- 
nate wealth to recommend him — excite no 
interest. He is not a personage. Hence 
there was very little talk about the lamen- 
table end of Mr. Ransome’s married life. 
There were hardly half a dozen paragraphs 
in our local papers, all told ; and I doubt if 
any of those were quoted in the Figaro or 
Qalignani. My patient might congratulate 
himself upon his obscurity.” 

“ Did no one from England visit him dur- 
ing his confinement here?” 


136 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“No one. The local authorities looked 
after his interests so far as to take care of 
the ready money which was found in his 
house, and which sufficed to pay for the 
poor lady's funeral and for my patient's ex- 
penses, leaving a balance to be handed over 
to him on his recovery. From the hour he 
left these gates I never heard from him or of 
him again, but every new year has brought 
me an anonymous gift from London — such 
a gift as only a person of refined taste would 
choose, and I have attributed those annual 
greetings to Mr. George Ransome.” 

“ It would be only like him to remember 
past kindness. ” 

“You know him well, madame?" 

“Very well; so well as to be able to an- 
swer with my life for his being incapable of 
the crime of which even you, who saw so 
much of him, hesitate to acquit him." 

“It is my misfortune, madame, to have 
seen the darker sides of the human mind, 
and to know that in the whitest life there 
may be one black spot — one moment of sin 
which stultifies a lifetime of virtue. Howev- 
er, it is possible that your judgment is right 
in this particular case. Be assured I should 
be glad to think so, and glad to know that Mr. 
Ransome’s after-days have been all sunshine.” 

A sigh was Mildred’s only answer. Mon- 
sieur Leroy saw tears in her eyes, and asked 
no more. He was shrewd enough to guess 
her connection with his former patient— a 
second wife, no doubt. No one but a wife 
would be so intensely interested. 

“ If there is anything I can do for you, or 
for my old patient — ” he began, seeing that 
his visitor lingered. 

“Oh no, there is nothing— except if you 
would let me see the rooms in which he 
lived.” 

“Assuredly. It is a melancholy pleasure 
at best to recall the sorrows we have out- 
lived, but the association will be less painful 
in your case, since the friend in j\ffiom you 
are interested was so speedily and so thor- 
oughly restored to mental health. I take it 
that he has never had a relapse?” 

“ Never, thank God!” 

“ It was not likely, from the history of the 
case.” 

He led the way across the vestibule and 
up stairs to the second fioor, where he show- 
ed Mrs. Greswold two airy rooms, sitting- 


room and bedroom communicating, over- 
looking the valley towards Cimies, with the 
white-walled convent on the crest of the hill, 
and the white temples of the dead cluster- 
ing near it; cross and column, Athenian 
pediment and Italian cupola dazzling white 
against the cloudless blue. The rooms were 
neatly furnished, and there was every ap- 
pearance of comfort, no suggestion of bed- 
lam, padded walls, or strait- waistcoats. 

“ Had he these rooms all the time?” asked 
Mildred. 

“ Not all the time. He was somewhat dif- 
ficult to deal with during the first few weeks, 
and he was in the main building, under the 
care of one of my subordinates, till improve- 
ment began. By that time I had grown in- 
terested in his case, and took him into my 
own house.” 

“ Pray let me see the room he occupied 
at first, monsieur ; I want to know all. I 
want to be able to understand what his life 
was like in that dark dream.” 

She knew now what his own dream meant. 

Monsieur Leroy indulged her whim. He 
took her across the dusty garden to the great 
white house — a house of many windows and 
long, white corridors — airy, bare, hopeless- 
looking, as it seemed to that sad visitor. 
She saw the two iron-barred enclosures, and 
the restless creatures roaming about them, 
clinging to the bars, climbing like monkeys 
from perch to perch, hanging from the tra- 
peze. The Spaniard had left off singing. 

She was shown George Ransome’s room, 
which was empty. The bare whitewashed 
walls chilled her as if she had gone into an 
ice- vault. Here on everything there was the 
stamp of a State-prison — iron bars, white 
walls,, a deadly monotony. She was glad to 
escape into the open air again; but not un- 
til she had knelt for some minutes beside the 
narrow bed upon which George Ransome 
had lain seventeen years ago, and thanked 
God for her dear one’s restoration to reason, 
and prayed that his declining days might be 
blessed. She prayed for him to whom she 
might never more be the source of happi- 
ness, she who until so lately had been his 
nearest and dearest upon earth. 

A law which she recognized as duty had 
risen up between them, and both must go 
down to the grave in sadness rather than 
that law should be broken. 


THE FATAL THREE. 137 


CHAPTER IX. 

A WRECKED LIFE. 


Monsieur Leroy was interested by his 
visitor, and in nowise hastened her depart- 
ure. He led her through the garden of the 
asylum, anxious that she should see that sad 
life of the shattered mind in its fairer and 
milder aspect. The quieter patients were al- 
lowed to amuse themselves at liberty in the 
garden, and here Mildred saw the woman 
who fancied herself the Blessed Virgin, and 
who sat apart from the rest with a crown of 
faded anemones upon her iron-gray locks. 

The doctor stopped to talk to her in the 
Niceois language, describing her hallucina- 
tion to Mildred in his broken English be- 
tween whiles. 

“She is one of my oldest cases, and as 
gentle a creature as ever breathed,” he said. 
‘ ‘ She is what superstition has made her ; 
she might have been a happy wife and moth- 
er but for that fatal influence. Ah ! here 
comes a lady of a very different temper, and 
not half so easy a subject. ” 

A woman of about sixty advanced towards 
them aloqg the dusty gravel-path between 
the trampled grass and the shabby orange- 
trees, whitened with the dust from the road, 
a woman who carried her head and shoulders 
with the hauteur of an empress, and who 
looked about her with bright,' defiant eyes, 
fanning herself with a large Japanese paper 
fan as she came along — a fan of vivid scarlet 
and cheap gilt paper, which seemed to inten- 
sify the brilliancy of her great black eyes as 
she waved it to and fro before her dark and 
haggard face— a woman who must once have 
been beautiful. 

“ Would you believe that lady was prima 
donna at La Scala nearly forty years ago?” 
asked the doctor, as he and Mildred stood 
beside the path, watching that strange figure 
with its air of scenic dignity. 

The massive plaits of rusty black hair, 
streaked with gray, were wound coronet-wise 
about the woman’s head. Her rusty black 
velvet gown trailed in the dust, threadbare 
long ago, almost in tatters to-day — a gown 


of a strange fashion, which had been worn 
upon the stage — Leonora’s or Lucretia’s 
gown, perhaps, once upon a time. 

At sight of the physician she stopped sud- 
denly, and made him a sweeping courtesy 
with all the exaggerated grace of the theatre. 

“ Do you know if they open this month at 
the Scala?” she asked in Italian. 

“ Indeed, my dear, I have heard nothing 
of their doings.” 

“They might have begun their season 
with the new year,” she said, with a dicta- 
torial air; “they always did it in my time. 
Of course you know that they have tried 
to engage me again. They wanted me for 
Amina, but I had to remind them that I am 
not a light soprano. When I reappear it shall 
be as Lucrezia Borgia. There I stand on my 
own ground. No one can touch me there.” 

She sang the opening bars of Lucrezia’s 
first scena. The once glorious voice was 
rough and discordant, but there was power 
in the tones even yet, and real dramatic fire 
in the midst of exaggeration. Suddenly, 
while she was singing, she caught the ex- 
pression of Mildred’s face watching her, and 
she stopped at a breath and grasped the stran- 
ger by both hands with an excited air. 

“That moves you, does it not?” she ex- 
claimed. “You have a soul for music; I can 
see that in your face. I should like to know 
more of you. Come and see me whenever 
you like and I will sing to you. The doctor 
lets me use his piano sometimes, when he is 
in a good humor. ” 

“ Say rather when you are reasonable, my 
good Maria,” said Monsieur Leroy, laying a 
fatherly hand upon her shoulder; “there are 
days when you are not to be trusted.” 

“ I am to bb trusted to-day. Let me come 
to your room and sing to her ” — pointing to 
Mildred with her fan — “ I like her face. She 
has the eyes and lips that console. Her hus- 
band is lucky to have such a wife. Let me 
sing to her; I want her to understand what 
kind of woman I am.” 


138 


I'HE FATAL THREE. 


“Would it bore you too much to indulge 
her, madame?” asked the doctor in an under- 
tone. ‘ ‘ She is a strange creature, and will take 
it sorely to heart if she is refused. She does 
not often take a fancy to any one; but she 
frequently takes dislikes, and those are vio- 
lent.” 

“ I shall be very happy to hear her,” an- 
swered Mildred. “ I am in no hurry to re- 
turn to Nice.” 

The doctor led the way back to his house, 
the singer talking to Mildred with an excited 
air as they went, talking of the day when she 
was prima donna at Milan. 

“Everybody envied me my success,” she 
said. ‘ ‘ There were those who said I owed 
everything to him — that he made my voice 
and my style. Lies, madame, black and bit- 
ter lies! I won all the prizes at the Conserva- 
toire. He was one master among many. I 
owed him nothing — nothing — nothing!” 

She reiterated the word with acrid empha- 
sis and an angry furl of her fan. 

“Ah, now you are beginning the old strain,” 
said the doctor, with a good-humored shrug 
of his shoulders. “ If this goes on there shall 
be no piano for you to-day. I will have no 
grievances — grievances are the bane of social 
intercourse. If you come to my salon it must 
be to sing, not to reopen old sores. We all 
have our wounds as well as you, signorina, 
but we keep them covered up.” 

“lam dumb,” said the singer, meekly. 
They went into the doctor’s private sitting- 
room. Three sides of the room were lined 
with books, chiefly of a professional or sci- 
entific character. A cottage piano stood in 
a recess by the fireplace. The woman flew 
to the instrument with a rapturous eagerness 
and began to play. Her han^s were faintly 
tremulous with excitement, but her touch 
was that of a master as she played the sym- 
phony to the finale of “La Cenerentola.” 

“Has she no piano in her own room?” 
asked Mildred in a whisper. 

“ No, poor soul; she is one of our pauper 
patients. The State provides for her, but it 
does not give her a private robm or a piano. 
I let her come here two or three times a week 
for an hour or so, when she is reasonable.” 

Mildred wondered if it would be possible 
for her, as a stranger, to provide a room and 
a piano for this friendless enthusiast. She 
would have been glad out of her abundance 


to have lightened a suffering sister’s fate, and 
she determined to make the proposition to the 
doctor. 

The singer played snatches of familiar mu- 
sic— Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini— operatic airs 
wiiich Mildred knew by heart. She wander- 
ed from one scena to another, and her voice, 
though it had lost its sweetness and sustain- 
ing power, was still brilliantly flexible. She 
sang for about a quarter of an hour with but 
little intermission — Mildred and the doctor 
sitting quietly at each side of the hearth, 
where a single pine-log smouldered on the 
iron dogs above a heap of white ashes. 

Presently the music changed to a gayer, 
lighter strain, and she began an airy cava- 
tina, all coquetry and grace. That joyous 
melody was curiously familiar to Mildred’s 
ear. 

“ Where did I hear that music?” she said 
aloud. “ It seems as if it were only the other 
day, and yet it is nearly two years since I was 
at the opera. ” 

The singer left the cavatina unfinished, 
and wandered into another melody. 

“Ah, I know now!” exclaimed Mildred; 
“that is Paolo Castellani’s music.” 

The woman started up from the piano as 
if the name had been an arrow that pierced 
her breast. 

“Paolo Castellani!” she cried. “What do 
you know of Paolo Castellani?” 

Dr. Leroy went over to her, and laid his 
hand upon her shoulder heavily. 

“ Now we are in for a scene,” he muttered 
to Mildred. “You have mentioned a most 
unlucky name.” 

“What has she to do with Signor Castel- 
lani?” 

“ He was her cousin. He trained her for 
the stage, and she was the original in several 
of his operas — she was his slave, his creature, 
and lived only to please him. I suppose she 
expected him to marry her, poor soul ; but he 
knew better than that. He contrived to fas- 
cinate a French girl, a consumptive, who was 
travelling in Italy for her health, with a 
wealthy father. He married the French- 
woman, and I believe that marriage broke 
Julietta’s heart.” 

The singer had seated herself at the piano 
again, and was playing with rapid and brill- 
iant finger, running up and down the keys 
in a style that indicated intense excitement. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


Mildred and the physician were standing by 
the window, talking in lowered voices, un- 
heeded by Maria Castellani. 

“Was it that event which wrecked her 
mind?” asked Mildred, deeply interested. 

“No, it was some years afterwards that 
her brain gave way. She had a brilliant ca- 
reer before her at the time of Castellani's 
desertion, and she bore the blow with the 
courage of a Roman. So long as her voice 
lasted, and the public were constant to her, 
she contrived to bear up against that burn- 
ing sense of wrong which has been the dis- 
tinguishing note of her mind ever since she 
came here. But the first breath of failure 
froze her. She felt her voice decaying while 
she was comparatively a young woman. Her 
glass told her that she was losing her beauty, 
that she was beginning to look old and hag- 
gard. Her managers told her more. They 
gave her the cold shoulder, and put newer 
singers above her head. Then despair took 
hold of her, she became gloomy and irritable, 
difficult and capricious in her dealings with 
her fellow-artistes — and then came the end, 
and she was brought here. She had saved 
no money. She had been reckless and ex- 
travagant even beyond the habits of her pro- 
fession. She was friendless. There was no- 
body interested in her fate—” 

“Not even Signor Castellani?” 

“Castellani — Paolo Castellani, lUe. 
The man was a compound of selfishness and 
falsehood. She was not likely to get pity 
from him. The very fact that he had used 
her badly made her loathsome to him. I 
doubt if he ever inquired what became of 
her. If any one had asked him about her 
he would have said that she had dropped 
through — a worn-out voice — a faded beauty 
— que voulez-vous.'’ 

“ Had she no other friends— no ties?” 

“None. She was an orphan at twelve 
years old, without a sou. Castellani paid 
for her education, and traded upon her talent. 
He trained her to sing in his own operas, and 
in that light, fanciful music she was at her 
best, though it is her idea now that she ex- 
celled in the grand style. I believe he ab- 
sorbed the greater part of her earnings, until 
they quarrelled. Some time after his mar- 
riage there was a kind of reconciliation be- 
tween them. She appeared in a new opera 
—his last and worst. Her voice was going. 


139 

his talent had begun to fail. It was the be- 
ginning of the end.” 

‘ ‘ Has Signor Castellani’s son shown no in- 
terest in this poor creature’s fate?” 

“No, the son lives in England, I believe, 
for the most part. I doubt if he knows any- 
thing about Maria. ” 

The singer had reverted to that familiar 
music. She sang the first part of an aria, a 
melody disguised with overmuch floritura, 
light, graceful, unmeaning. 

“ That is in his last opera,” she said, rising 
from the piano, with a more rational air. 
“The opera was almost a failure, but I was 
applauded to the echo. His genius had 
forsaken him. Follies, follies, falsehoods, 
crimes. He could not be true to any one or 
anything. He was as false to his wife as he 
had been false to me — and to his proud young 
English signorina — ah — well — who can doubt 
that he lied to her?” 

She fell into a meditative mood, standing 
by the piano, touching a note now and then. 

“ Young and handsome and rich. Would 
she have accepted degradation with open 
eyes? No, no, no. He lied to her as he had 
lied to me. He was made up of lies.” 

Her eyes grew troubled, and her lips work- 
ed convulsively. Again the doctor laid his 
strong broad hand upon her shoulder, 

“Come, now, Maria,” he said, in Italian, 
“enough for to-day. Madame has been well 
pleased by your singing.” 

“Yes, indeed, signora. You have a noble 
voice. I should be very glad if I could do 
anything to be of use to you — if I could con- 
tribute to your comfort in any way.” 

“Oh, Maria is happy enough with us, I 
hope,” said the doctor, cheerily. “We are 
all fond of her when she is reasonable. But 
it is time she went to her dinner. A rimderd, 
signora.” 

Maria accepted her dismissal with a good 
grace, saluted Mildred and the doctor with 
her stage courtesy, and withdrew. One side 
of Monsieur Leroy’s house opened into the 
garden, the other into a court-yard adjoining 
the high-road. 

“ Poor soul, I should be so glad to pay for 
a piano and a private sitting-room for her, if 
I might be allowed to do so,” said Mildred, 
when the singer was gone. 

“You are too generous, madame ; but I 
doubt if it would be good for her to accept 


140 


THE FATAL THREE. 


your bounty. She enjoys the occasional 
use of my piano intensely. If she had one 
always at her command, she would give her- 
self up too completely to music, which exer- 
cises too strong an influence upon her disor- 
dered brain to be indulged in ad libitum. 
Nor would a private apartment be an advan- 
tage in her case. She is too much given to 
brooding over past griefs ; and the society of 
her fellow-sufferers, the friction and move- 
ment of the public life, is good for her.” 

“What did she mean by her talk of an 
English girl— some story of wrong-doing — 
or was it all imaginary?” 

“ I believe there was some scandal at Milan 
— some flirtation — or possibly an intrigue — 
between Castellani and one of his English 
pupils ; but I never heard the details. Maria’s 
jealousy would be likely to exaggerate the 
circumstances, for I believe she adored hel 
cousin to the last, long after she knew that 
he had never cared for her, except as an ele- 
ment of his success.” 

Mildred took leave of the doctor, after 
thanking him for his politeness. She left 
a handful of gold for the benefit of the poor 
patients, and left Dr. Leroy under the im- 
pression that she was one of the sweetest 
women he had ever met. Her pensive beau- 
ty, her low and musical voice, the clear and 
resolute purpose of every word and look 
were, in his mind, indications of the perfec- 
tion of womanhood. 

“ It is not often that Nature achieves such 
excellence,” mused the doctor. “ It is a pity 
that perfection should be short-lived, yet I 
cannot prognosticate length of years for this 
lady.” 

Pamela’s spirits were decidedly improv- 
ing. She talked all dinner-time, and gave a 
graphic description of her afternoon in the 
tennis-court behind the Cercle de la Medi- 
terranee. 

“ I am to see the club-house some morn- 
ing, before the members begin to arrive,” 
she said. “ It is a perfectly charming club. 
There is a theatre, which serves as a ball- 
room on grand occasions. There is to be 
a dance next week, and Lady Lochinvar will 
chaperon me, if you don’t mind.” 


“ I shall be most grateful to Lady Lochin- 
var, dear. Believe me, if I am a hermit I 
don’t want to keep you in melancholy se- 
clusion. I am very glad for you to have 
pleasant friends.” 

“Mrs. Murray is delightful. She begged 
me to call her Jessie. She is going to take 
me for a drive before lunch to-morrow, and 
we are to do some shopping in the afternoon. 
The shops here are simply lovely. ” 

“Almost as nice as Brighton?” 

‘ ‘ Better. They have more chic, and I am 
told they are twice as dear. ” 

“Was Mr. Stuart at the tennis-court?” 

“Yes, he plays there every afternoon when 
he is not at Monte Carlo.” 

“ That does not sound like a very useful 
existence.” 

“Perhaps you will say he is an advent- 
urer,” exclaimed Pamela, with a flash of 
temper; and then repenting in a moment, 
she added, “I beg your pardon, aunt, but 
you are really wrong about Mr. Stuart. He 
looks after Lady Lochinvar’s estate. He is 
invaluable to her.” 

“But he cannot do much for the estate 
when he is playing tennis here or gambling 
at Monte Carlo.” 

“ Oh, but he does. He answers no* end of 
letters every morning. Lady Lochinvar says 
he is a most wonderful young man. He at- 
tends to her house accounts here. I am afraid 
she would be very extravagant if she were 
not well looked after. She has no idea of 
business. Mr. Stuart has even to manage 
her dress-makers.” 

“ Then one may suppose he is really useful 
— even at Nice. Has he any means of his 
own, or is he entirely dependent on his aunt?” 

“Oh, he has an income of his own — a 
modest income, Mrs. Murray says, hardly 
enough for him to get along easily in a crack 
regiment, but quite enough for him as a civil- 
ian ; and his aunt will leave him everything. 
His expectations are splendid.” 

“ Well, Pamela, I will not call him an ad- 
venturer, and I shall be pleased to make his 
acquaintance, if he will call upon me.” 

“ He is dying to see you. May Mrs. Mur- 
ray bring him to tea to-morrow afternoon?” 
“With pleasure.” 


TPIE FATAL THREE. 


141 


CHAPTER X. , 

PAST AND PRESENT. 


George Greswold succumbed to Fate. 
I He had done all he could do in the way of 
resistance. He had appealed against his 
wife’s decision ; he had set love against prin- 
j ciple, or prejudice; and principle, as Mildred 
understood it, had been too strong for love; 
so there was nothing left for the forsaken 
husband but submission. He went back to 
the home in which he had once been happy, 
and he sat down amid the ruins of his domes- 
tic life ; he sat by his desolate hearth through 
the long, dull wintry months, and he made 
no effort to bring brightness or variety into 
its existence. He made no stand against un- 
merited misfortune. 

“ I am too old to forget,” he told himself; 
“that lesson can only be learned in youth.” 

A young man might have gone out as a 
wanderer, might have sought excitement and 
distraction amid strange cities and strange 
races of men, might have found forgetful- 
ness in danger and hardships, the perils of 
unexplored deserts, the hazards of untrodden 
mountains, the hair-breadth escapes of savage 
life, pestilence, famine, warfare. George Gres- 
wold felt no inclination for any such advent- 
ure. The* main-spring of life had snaj)ped, 
and he admitted to himself that he was a 
broken man. 

He sat by the hearth in his spacious libra- 
ry day after day, and night after night, until 
the small hours. Sometimes he took his gun 
in the early morning, and went out with a 
couple of dogs for an hour or two of soli- 
tary shooting among his own covers. He 
tramped his copses in all weathers and at all 
hours, but he rarely went outside of his own 
domain, nor did he ever visit his cottagers or 
small tenantry, with whom he had been once 
so familiar a friend. All interest in his estate 
had gone from him after his daughter’s death. 
He left everything to the new steward, who 
was, happily, both competent and honest. 

His books were his only friends. Those 
studious habits acquired years before, when 
he was comparatively a poor man, stood by 


him now. His one distraction, his only sol- 
ace, was found in the contents of those ca- 
pacious book-shelves, three-fourths of which 
were filled with volumes of his own selec- 
tion, the gradual accumulations of his six- 
teen years of ownership. His grandfather’s 
library consisted of those admirable standard 
works, in the largest possible number of vol- 
umes, which formed an item in the furniture 
of a respectable house during the last cen- 
tury, and which, from the stiffness of their 
bindings and the unblemished appearance of 
their paper and print, would seem to have 
enjoyed an existence of dignified retirement 
from the day they left the bookseller’s shop. 

But for those long tramps in the wintry 
copses, where holly and ivy showed brightly 
green amid leafless chestnuts and hazels, but 
for those communings with the intellect of 
past and present in the long, still winter 
evenings, George Greswold’s brain must have 
given way under the burden of an undeserved 
sorrow. As it was, he contrived to live on, 
peacefully, and even with an air of content- 
ment. His servants surprised him in no par- 
oxysm of grief. He startled them with no 
strange exclamations. His manner gave no 
cause for alarm. He accepted his lot in si- 
lence and submission. His days were order- 
ed with a simple regularity, so far as the serv- 
ice of the house went. His valet and butler 
agreed that he was in all things an admirable 
master. 

The idea in the household was that Mrs. 
Greswold had “taken to religion.” That 
seemed the only possible explanation for a 
parting which had been preceded by no do- 
mestic storms, for which there was no ap- 
parent cause in the conduct of the husband. 
That idea of the wife having discovered an 
intrigue of her husband’s, which Louisa had 
discussed in the house - keeper’s room at 
Brighton, was no longer entertained in the 
servants’ hall at Enderby. 

“If there had been anything of that kind 
something would have come out by this 


143 


THE FATAL THREE. 


time,” said the butler, who had a profound 
belief in the ultimate “coming out” of all 
social mysteries. 

George Greswold was not kept in igno- 
rance of his wife’s movements. Pamela had 
been shrewd enough to divine that her uncle 
would be glad to hear from her in order to 
hear of Mildred, and she had written to him 
from time to time, giving him an animated 
picture of her own and her aunt’s existence. 

There had been only one suppression. The 
young lady had not once alluded to Mr. Cas- 
tellani’s share in their winter life at Pallanza. 
She had a horror of arousing that dragon of 
suspicion which she knew to lurk in the 
minds of all uncles with reference to all 
agreeable young men. George Greswold 
had not heard from his niece for more than 
a fortnight, when there came a letter, writ- 
ten the day after Mildred’s visit to the mad- 
house, and full of praises of Lady Lochinvar 
and the climate of Nice. That letter was the 
greatest shock that Greswold had received ' 
since his wife had left him, for it told him I 
that she was in a place where she could 
scarcely fail to discover all the details of his 
wretched story. He had kept it locked from 
her, he had shut himself behind a wall of 
iron, he had kept a silence as of the grave, 
and now she from whom he had prayed that 
his fatal story might be forever hidden, she 
was certain to learn the worst. 

“Aunt went to lunch with Lady Lochin- 
var the day after our arrival,” wrote Pamela. 
“She spent a long morning with her, and 
then went for a drive somewhere in the en- 
virons, and was out till nearly dinner-time. 
She looked so white and fagged when she 
came back, poor dear ! and I am sure she 
had done too much for one day. Lady Loch- 
invar asked me to dinner, and took me to 
the new opera-house, which is lovely. Her 
nephew was with us : rather plain, and with 
no taste for music — he said he preferred 
‘ Madame Angot ’ to ‘ Lohengrin ’ — but enor- 
mously clever, I am told, in a solid, practical 
kind of way.” 

Und so welter, for three more pages. 

Mildred had been with Lady Lochinvar — 
with Lady Lochinvar, who knew all ; who 
had seen him and his wife together, had re- 
ceived them both as her friends; had been 
confided in, he knew, by that fond, jealous 
wife, made the recipient of tearful doubts 


and hysterical accusations. Vivien had own- 
ed as much to him. 

She had been with Lady Lochinvar, who 
must know the history of his wife’s death, 
and the dreadful charge brought against him; 
who must know that he had been an inmate 
of the great white barrack on the road to St. 
Andre; who in all probability thought him 
guilty of murder. All the barriers had fall- 
en now — all the floodgates had opened. He 
saw himself hateful, monstrous, inhuman, in 
the eyes of the woman he adored. 

“ She loved her sister with an inextinguish- 
able love,” he thought, “and she sees me now 
as her sister’s murderer — the cold-blooded, 
cruel husband, who made his wife’s existence 
miserable, and ended by killing her in a par- 
oxysm of brutal rage. That is the kind of 
monster I must seem in my Mildred’s eyes. 
She will look back upon m}'- stubborn si- 
lence, my gloomy reserve, and she will see 
all the indications of guilt. My own con- 
duct will condemn me.” 

As he sat by his solitary hearth in the cold 
March evening, the large reading-lamp mak- 
ing a circle of light amid the shadowy gloom, 
George Greswold’s mind travelled over the 
days of his youth, and the period of that fa- 
tal marriage, which had blighted him in the 
morning of his life, which blighted him now 
in life’s meridian, when, but for this dark in- 
fluence, all the elements of happiness were 
in his hand. 

He looked back to the morning of life, and 
saw himself full of ambitious plans and as- 
piring dreams; well content to be the young- 
er son, to whom it was given to make his 
own position in the world, scorning the idle 
days of a fox-hunting squire, resolute to be- 
come an influence for good among his fel- 
low-men. He had never envied his brother 
the inheritance of the soil, he had thought 
but little of his own promised inheritance of 
Enderby. 

Unhappily, that question of the succession 
to the Enderby estate had been a sore point 
with Squire Ransome. He adored his elder 
son, who was like him in character and per- 
son, and he cared very little for George, 
whom he considered a bookish and unsym- 
pathetic individual— a young man who hard- 
ly cared whether there were few or many 
foxes in the district, whether the young par- 
tridges throve or perished by foul weather or 


THE FATAL THREE. 


143 


epidemic disease — a young man who took no 
interest in the things that filled the lives of 
other people. In a word, George was not a 
sportsman, and that deficiency made him an 
alien to his father’s race. There had never 
been a Ransome who was not “sporting” to 
the core of his heart, until the appearance of 
this pragmatical Oxonian. 

Without being in any manner scientific or 
a student of evolution, Mr. Ransome had a 
fixed belief in heredity. It was the duty of 
the son to resemble the father; and a son 
who was in all his tastes and inclinations a 
distinct variety stamped himself as undutiful. 

“I don’t suppose the fellow can help it,” 
said Mr. Ransome, testily; “but there’s hard- 
ly a remark he makes which doesn’t act upon 
my nerves like a nutmeg-grater.” 

Nobody would have given the squire cred- 
it for possessing very sensitive nerves, but 
everybody knew he had a temper, and a tem- 
per which occasionally showed itself in vio- 
lent outbreaks — the kind of temper which 
will dismiss a household at one fell swoop, 
send a stud of horses to Tattersall’s on the 
spur of the moment, tear up a lease on the 
point of signature, or turn a son out-of-doors. 

The knowledge that this unsportsmanlike 
son of his would inherit the fine estate of 
Enderby was a constant source of vexation 
to Squire Ransome, of Mapledown. The 
dream of his life was that Mapledown and i 
Enderby should be united in the possession 
of his son Gilbert. The two properties 
would have made Gilbert rich enough to hope 
for a peerage, and that idea of a possible 
peerage dazzled the Tory squire. His family 
had done the State some service in their time, 
had sat for important boroughs, had squan- 
dered much money in contested elections, 
had been stanch in times of change and 
difficulty. There was no reason why a Ran- 
some should not ascend to the Upper House 
in these days when peerages are bestowed so 
much more freely than in the time of Pitt 
and Fox. The two estates would have made 
an important property under the one owner- 
ship; divided they were only respectable. 
And what the squire most keenly felt was 
the fact that Enderby was by far the finer 
property, and that his younger son must 
ultimately be a much richer man than his 
brother. The Sussex estate had dwindled 
considerably in those glorious days of con- 


tested elections and party feeling; the Hamp- 
shire estate was intact. Mr. Ransome could 
not forgive his wife for her determination 
that the younger son should be her heir. He 
always shuffied uneasily upon his seat in the 
old family pew when the 27th chapter of 
Genesis was read in the Sunday morning serv- 
ice. He compared his wife to Rebecca. He 
asked the vicar at luncheon on one of those 
Sundays what he thought of the conduct of 
Rebecca and Jacob in that very shady trans- 
aetion, and the vicar replied in the orthodox 
fashion, favoring Jacob just as Rebecca had 
favored him. 

“I can’t understand it,” exclaimed the 
squire, testily ; ‘ ‘ the whole business is against 
my idea of honor and honesty. I wouldn’t 
have such a fellow as Jacob for my steward 
if he were the cleverest man in Sussex. And 
look you here, vicar. If Jacob was right, 
and knew he was right, why the deuce was 
he so frightened the first time he met Esau 
after that ugly business? Take my word for 
it, Jacob was a sneak, and Providence pun- 
ished him rightly with a melancholy old age 
and a quarrelsome family.” 

The vicar looked down at his plate, sighed 
gently, and held his peace. 

The time came when the growing feeling 
of aversion on the father’s part showed itself 
in outrage and insult which the son could 
not endure. George remonstrated against 
certain acts of injustice in the management 
of the estate. He pleaded the cause of tenant 
against landlord, a dire offence in the old 
squire’s eyes. There came an open rupture, 
and it was impossible for the younger son to 
remain any longer under the father’s roof. 
His mother loved him devotedly, but she 
felt that it was better for him to go ; and so 
it was settled in loving consultation between 
them that he should carry out a long-cherish- 
ed wish of his college days, and explore all 
that was historical and interesting in Southern 
Europe, seeing men and cities in a leisurely 
way, and devoting himself to literature in the 
mean time. He had already written for some 
of the high-class magazines, and he felt that 
it was in him to do well as a writer of the 
serious order— critic, essayist, and thinker. 

His mother gave him £300 a year, which, 
for a man of his simple habits, was ample. 
He told himself that he should be able to 
earn as much again by his pen; and so, after 


144 


THE FATAL THREE. 


a farewell of decent friendliness to his father 
and his brother Gilbert, and tenderest parting 
with his mother, he set out upon his pilgrim- 
age, a free agent, with the world all before 
him. He explored Greece— dwelling fondly 
upon all the old traditions, the old histories. 
He made the acquaintance of Dr. Schliemann 
and entered heart and soul into that gentle- 
man’s views. This occupied him more than 
a year, for those scenes exercised a potent 
fascination upon a mind to which Greek lit- 
erature was the supreme delight. He spent 
a month at Constantinople and a winter in 
Corfu and Cyprus. He devoted a summer 
to Switzerland, and did a little mountaineer- 
ing; and during all his wanderings he con- 
trived to give a considerable portion of his 
time to literature. 

It was after his Swiss travels that he went 
to Italy, and established himself in Florence 
for a quiet winter. He hired an apartment 
on a fourth floor of a palace overlooking the 
Arno, and here, for the first time since he 
had left England, he went a little into general 
society. His mother had sent him letters of 
introduction to old friends of her own, Eng- 
lish and Florentine ; he was young, hand- 
some, and a gentleman, and he was received 
with enthusiasm. Had he been fond of so- 
ciety he might have been at parties every 
night; but he was fonder of books and of 
solitude, and he took very little advantage of 
people’s friendliness. , 

The few houses to which he went were 
houses famous for good music, and it was 
in one of these houses that he met Vivien 
Faux. 

It was in the midst of a symphony by 
Beethoven, while he was standing on the 
edge of the crowd which surrounded the 
open space given to the instrumentalists, that 
he first saw the w^oman who was to be his 
wife. She was sitting in the recess of a lofty 
window quite apart from the throng, a pale, 
dark-eyed girl, with roughened hair carelessly 
heaped above her low, broad forehead. Her 
slender figure and sloping shoulders showed 
to advantage in a low-necked black gown 
without a vestige of ornament. She wore 
neither jewels nor flowers, at an assembly 
■where gems are sparkling and flowers breath- 
ing sweetness upon every feminine bosom. 
Her thin, white arms hung loosely in her lap, 
her back was turned to the performers, and 


her eyes were averted from the crowd. She 
looked the image of ennui and indifference. 

He found his hostess directly the sym- 
phony was over, and asked her to introduce 
him to the young lady in the black velvet 
yonder, sitting alone in the window. 

‘ ‘ Have you been struck by Miss Faux’s 
rather singular appearance?” asked Madame 
Yicenti. “ She is not so handsome as many 
young ladies who are here to-night. ” 

“No, she is not handsome, but her face 
interests me. She looks as if she had suf- 
fered some great disappointment.” 

“ I believe her whole life has been a dis- 
appointment. She is an orphan, and as far 
as I can ascertain, a friendless orphan. She 
has good means, but there is a mystery 
about her position which places her in a 
manner apart from other girls of her age. 
She has no relations to whom to refer, no 
family home to which to return. She is 
here with some rather foolish people, an 
English artist and his wife, who cannot do 
very much for her, and I believe she feels 
her isolation intensely. It makes her bitter 
against other girls, and she loses friends as 
fast as she makes them. People won’t put 
up with her tongue. Well, Mr. Ransome, 
do you change your mind after that?” 

“On the contrary, I feel so much the more 
interested in the young lady.” 

“Ah, your interest will not last. However, 
I shall be charmed to introduce you.” 

They went across the room to that distant 
recess where Miss Faux was still seated, her 
air and attitude unchanged since George 
Ransome first observed her. She started 
■with a little look of surprise when Madame 
Vicenti and her companion approached; but 
she accepted the introduction with a noncha- 
lant air, and she replied to Ransome’s opening 
remarks with manifest indifference. Then 
by degrees she grew more animated, and 
talked about the people in the room, ridicul- 
ing their pretensions, their eccentricities, 
their costumes. 

“You are not an habitue here?” she asked. 
“I don’t remember seeing you before to- 
night.” 

“No; it is the first of Madame Vicenti’s 
parties that I have seen.” 

“ Then I conclude it will be the last ” 

“Why?” 

“ Oh, the whole business is intolerable. 




THE FATAL THREE. 


The music is good if oue could hear it any- 
where else, but the people are detestable.” 

“ Yet I conclude this is not your first even- 
ing here?” 

“ No, I come every week. I have nothing 
else to do with mysexf but to go about to 
houses I hate, and mix with people who 
hate me.” 

“Why should they hate you?” 

“ Oh, we all hate one another, and want to 
overreach one another. Envy and malice 
are in the air. Picture to yourself fifty ma- 
noeuvring mothers with a hundred marriage- 
able daughters, most of them portionless, and 
about twenty eligible men. Think what the 
competition must be like.” 

“But you are independent of all that; you 
are outside the arena.” 

“Yes, I have nothing to do with their 
slave-market, but they hate me all the same; 
perhaps because I have a little more money 
than most of them — perhaps because I am 
nobody— a waif and stray — able to give no 
account of my existence.” 

She spoke of her position with a reckless 
candor that shocked him. 

^ “ There is something to bear in every lot,” 

he said, trying to be philosophical. 

^ “I suppose so, but I oiily care about my 
P own burden. Please don’t pretend that you 
|\do either I should despise a man who pre- 
tended not to be selfish. ” 

6 “ Do you think that all men are selfish?” 

1^* “I have never seen any evidence to the 
contrary. ' The man I thought the noblest 
and best did me the greatest wrong it was 
possible to do me in order to spare himself 
trouble.” 

Ransome was silent. He would not enter 
into the discussion of a past history of which 
he was ignorant, and which was doubtless 
full of pain. 

After this he met her verj’- often, and while 
other young men avoided her on account of her 
bitter tongue, he showed a preference for her 
society and encouraged her to confide in him. 
She went everywhere, chaperoned by Mr. 
Mortimer, a dreary twaddler, who was for- 
ever expounding theories of art which he 
had learned, parrot-wise, in a London acad- 
emy, thirty years before. His latest ideas 
were coeval with Maclise and Mulready. 
Mrs. Mortimer was by way of being an in- 
valid, and sat and nursed her neuralgia at 
10 


145 

home while her husband and Miss Faux went 
into society. 

It was at the beginning of spring that an 
American lady of wealth and standing invited 
the Mortimers and their protegee to a picnic 
to which Mr. Ransome was also bidden ; and 
it was this picnic which sealed George Ran- 
some’s fate. Pity for Vivien’s lonely posi- 
tion had grown into a sincere regard. He 
had discovered warm feelings under that 
cynical manner, a heart capable of a pro- 
found affection. She had talked to him of 
a child, a kind of adopted sister, whom she 
had passionately loved, and from whom she 
had been parted by the selfish cruelty of the 
little girl’s parents. 

“ My school life in England had soured me 
before then,” she said, “and I was not a very 
amiable person even at fifteen years old; but 
that cruelty finished me. I have hated my 
fellow-creatures ever since.” 

He pleaded against this wholesale condem- 
nation. 

“You were unlucky,” he said, “in en- 
countering unworthy people.” 

“Ah, but one of those people, the child’s 
father, had seemed to me the noblest of men. 
I had believed in him as second only to God in 
benevolence and generosity. When he failed 
I renounced my belief in human goodness.” 

Unawares George Ransome had fallen into 
the position of her confidant and friend. 
From friendship to love was an easy transi- 
tion, and a few words, spoken at random, 
during a ramble on an olive-clad hill, bound 
him to her forever. Those unpremeditated 
words loosed the fountain of tears, and he 
saw the most scornful of women, the woman 
who affected an absolute aversion for his sex, 
and a contempt for those weaker sisters who 
waste their love upon such vile clay — he saw 
her abandon herself to a passion of tears at 
the first word of affection which he had ever 
addressed to her. He had spoken as a friend 
rather than as a lover, but those tears bound 
him to her for life. He put his arm round 
her, and pillowed the small pale face upon 
his breast, the dark impassioned eyes looking 
up at him drowned in tears. 

“You should not have said those words,” 
she sobbed. “You cannot understand what 
it is to have lived as I have lived — a creature 
apart— unloved— unvalued. Oh, is it true— 
do you really care for me?” 


146 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“ With all ray heart,” he answered, and in 
all good faith. 

His profound compassion took the place of 
love ; and in that moment he believed that he 
loved her as a man should love the woman 
he chooses for his wife. 

They were married within a month from 
that March afternoon, and for some time their 
married life was happy. He wished to take 
her to England, but she implored him to 
abandon that idea. 

“In England everybody would want to 
know who I am,” she said. “I should be 
tortured by questions about ‘my people.’ 
Here society is less exacting.” 

He deferred to her in this as he would have 
done in any other matter which involved her 
happiness. They spent the first half year of 
their married life in desultory wanderings in 
the Oberland and the Engadine, and then set- 
tled at Nice for the winter. 

Here Mrs. Ransome met Lady Lochinvar, 
whom she had known at Florence, and was 
at once invited to the Palais Montano; and 
here for the first time appeared those clouds 
which were too soon to darken George Ran- 
some’s domestic horizon. 

There were many beautiful women at Nice 
that winter, handsome Irish girls, vivacious 
Americans, Frenchwomen, and Englishwom- 
en, and among so many who were charming 
there were some whom George Ransome did 
not scruple to admire, with as much frank- 
ness as he would have admired a face by 
Guido or Raphael. He was slow to perceive 
his wife’s distrust, could hardly bring him- 
self to believe that she could be jealous of 


him ; but he was not suffered to remain long 
in this happy ignorance. An hysterical out- 
burst one night after their return from a 
ball at the club-house opened the husband’s 
eyes. The demon of jealousy stood revealed ; 
and from that hour the angel of domestic 
peace was banished from George Ransome’s 
hearth. 

He struggled against that evil influence. 
He exercised patience, common - sense, for- 
bearance, but in vain. There were lulls in 
the storm sometimes, delusive calms ; and he 
hoped the demon was exorcised. And then 
came a worse outbreak; more hysterics; de- 
spairing self - abandonment ; threats of sui- 
cide. He bore it as long as he could, and, ul- 
timately, his wife’s health offering an excuse 
for such a step, he proposed that they should 
leave Nice, and take a villa in the environs, 
in some quiet spot where they might live 
apart from all society. 

Vivien accepted the proposition with rapt- 
ure ; she flung herself at her husband’s feet, 
covered his hands with tearful kisses. 

“ Oh, if I could but believe that you still 
love me, that you are not weary of me,” she 
exclaimed, “I should be the happiest woman 
in the universe. ” 

They spent a week of halcyon peace, driv- 
ing about in quest of their new home. They 
explored the villages within ten miles of Nice, 
they breakfasted at village restaurants, in the 
sunny March noontide, and finally they set- 
tled upon a villa at St. Jean, within an hour’s 
drive of the great white city, and to this new 
home they went at the end of the month, af- 
ter bidding adieu to their friends in Nice. 


CHAPTER XL 

THE RIFT IN THE LUTE. 


The villa was built on a ledge of ground 
between the road and the sea. There was a 
stone terrace in front of the windows of salon 
and dining-room, below which the ground 
shelved steeply down to the rocks and the blue 
water. The low irregular-shaped house was, 
as it were, embedded in a grove of orange and 
lemon trees, with a peach or a cherry here 
and there to give variety of color. In one 


corner there was a whole cluster of peach- 
trees, which made a mass of purplish-pinky 
bloom. The ridges of garden sloping down 
from the stone terraoe were full of white 
stocks and scarlet anemones. Clusters of 
red ranunculus made spots of flame in the 
sun— and the young leaves in the long hedge 
of Dijon roses made an interlacing screen of 
crimson through which the sun shone as 


THE FATAL THREE. 


147 


through old ruby glass in a cathedral win- 
dow. Everywhere there was a feast of per- 
fume and color and beauty. The little bay, 
the curving pier, the white-sailed boats, which, 
seen from the height above, looked no bigger 
than the gulls skimming across the blue— 
the quaint old houses of Villefranche on a 
level with the water, and rising tier above 
tier to the crest of the hill — pink and blue 
houses, white and cream-colored houses, with 
pea-green shutters and red roofs. Far away 
to the left the jutting promontory and the 
tall white light-house ; and away southward 
the Mediterranean in all its glory of turquoise 
and sapphire. And this lovely little world 
at George Ransome’s feet, this paradise in 
miniature, was all the lovelier because of the 
great rugged mountain wall behind it, the 
bare red and yellow hills baked in the sun- 
light of ages, the strange old-world villages 
yonder high up on the stony flanks of the 
hills, the far-away church-towers, from which 
faintest echoes of bells came now and again 
as if from fairy-land. 

It was a delicious spot this little village of 
St. Jean, to which the Niceois came on Sun- 
days and holidays, to eat bouillabaisse at the 
rustic tavern or to picnic in the shade of 
century-old olives or dark -leaved carouba- 
trees. George Ransome loved the place, and 
could have been happy there if his wife 
would only have allowed him. Unfortunate- 
ly, there are women to whom domestic peace, 
a calm and rational happiness, is an impossi- 
bility, and Vivien was one of these women. 

From the beginning her suspicious nature 
had been on the watch for some hidden evil. 
She had a fixed idea that the Fates had 
marked her for misery, and she would not 
accept the possibility of happiness. 

Was her husband unkind to her? No, he 
was all kindness; but his kindness was only 
a gentlemanlike form of toleration. He had 
married her out of pity, and it was pity that 
made him kind. Other women were wor- 
shipped. It was her fate to be only toler- 
ated by a man she adored. 

She could never forget her own passionate 
folly, her own unwomanly forwardness. She 
had thrown herself into his arms, she who 
should have waited to be wooed, and should 
have made herself precious by the difficulty 
with which she was won. 

“How can he help holding ine 9^eap?” 


she asked herself; “ I who cost him nothing 
— not even an hour of doubt. From the hour 
we first met he must have known that I 
adored him.” 

Once when he was rowing her about the 
bay in the westering sunlight, while the fish- 
ermen were laying down their lines, or tak- 
ing up their baskets here and there by the 
rocks, she asked him suddenly, 

“What did you think of me, George, the 
first time you saw me — that night at Signora 
Vicenti’s party? Come now, be candid. You 
can afford to tell me the truth now. Your 
fate is sealed ; you have nothing to lose or to 
gain.” 

“Do you think I would tell you less or 
more than the truth under any circumstances, 
Viva?” he asked, gravely. 

“ Oh, you are horribly exact, I know,” she 
answered, with an impatient movement of 
her slender sloping shoulders, not looking at 
him, but with her dark dreamy eyes gazing 
far off across the bay towards the distant 
point where the twin towers of Monaco Ca- 
thedral showed faint in the distance, “but, 
perhaps, if the truth sounded very rude you 
might suppress it— out of pity.” 

“I don’t think the truth need sound rude.” 

“ Well,” still more impatiently, “what im- 
pression did I make upon you ?” 

“You must consider that there were at 
least fifty young ladies in Signora Vicenti’s 
salons that evening.” 

“And about thirty old women; and I was 
lost in the crowd.” 

“Not quite lost. I remember being pre- 
sented to a young lady who sat in a window 
niche apart — ” 

‘ ‘ Like ‘ Brunswick’s fated chieftain. ’ Pray 
go on.” 

“ And who seemed a little out of harmony 
with the rest of the company. Her manner 
struck me as unpleasantly ironical, but her 
small, pale face struck me as interesting, and 
I even liked the mass of tousled hair brushed 
up from her low, square forehead. I liked 
her black lace gown, without any color or 
ornament. It set off the thin white shoul- 
ders and long slender throat.” 

“Did you think I was rich or poor, some- 
body or nobody?” 

“I thought you were a clever girl, soured 
by some kind of disappointment.” 

“And you felt sorry for me. Say you, 


148 


THE FATAL THREE. 


felt sorry for me, ” she cried, her eyes coming 
back from the distant promontory, and fix- 
ing him suddenly, bright, keen, imperious 
in their eager questioning. 

“Yes, I confess to feeling very sorry for 
you.” 

“Did I not know as much? From the 
very first you pitied me. Pity, pity! What 
an intolerable burden it is! I have bent un- 
der it all my life.” 

“ My dear Viva, what nonsense you talk! 
Because I had mistaken ideas about you that 
first night, when we were utter strangers — ” 

“You were not mistaken. I was soured. 
I had been disappointed. My thoughts were 
bitter as gall. I had no patience with other 
girls who had so many blessings that I had 
never known. I saw them making light of 
their advantages, peevish, ill-tempered, self- 
indulgent, and I scorned them. Contempt 
for others was the only comfort of my own 
barren life. And so my vinegar tongue dis- 
gusted you, did it not?” 

“I was not disgusted — concerned and in- 
terested rather. Y our conversation was orig- 
inal. I wanted to know more of you.” 

“Did you think me pretty?” 

“I was more impressed by your mental 
gifts than your physical — ” 

“ That is only a polite way of saying you 
thought me hideous.” 

“ Viva, you know better than that. If I 
thought of your appearance at all during the 
first meeting, be assured I thought you in- 
teresting — yes, and pretty. Only prettiness 
is a poor word to express a face that is full 
of intellect and originality.” 

“You thought me pale, faded, haggard, 
old for my age, ” she said, decisively. ‘ ‘ Don’t 
deny it. You must have thought what my 
glass had been telling me for the last year.” 

“I thought your face showed traces of 
suffering.” 

This was one of many such conversations, 
full of keen questioning on her part, with an 
assumed lightness of manner which thinly 
veiled the irritability of her mind. She had 
changed for the worse since they left Nice ; she 
had grown more sensitive, more suspicious, 
more irritable. She was in a condition of 
health in which many women are despondent 
or irritable ; in which with some women life 
seems one long disgust, and all things irk- 
some, even the things that have been pleas- 


antest and most valued before— even to the 
aspect of a lovely landscape, the phrases of 
a familiar melody, the perfume of a once fa- 
vorite flower. He tried to cheer her by talk- 
ing of their future, the time to come when 
there would be a new bond between them, a 
new interest in their lives; but she saw all 
things in a gloomy atmosphere. 

‘ ‘ Who knows ?” she said. ‘ ‘ I may die, per- 
haps; or you may love your child better tlian 
you have ever loved me, and then I should 
hate it.” 

“ Viva, you cannot doubt that my love for 
our child will strengthen my love for you.” 

“Will it?” she asked, incredulously. “ God 
knows it needs strengthening.” 

This was hard upon a man whose tender- 
ness and indulgence had been boundless; 
who had done all that chivalry and a sense 
of duty can do to atone for the lack of love. 
He had tried his uttermost to conceal that 
one bitter truth that love was wanting; but 
those keen eyes of hers had seen the gap be- 
tween them, that sensitive ear had discovered 
the rift in the lute. 

One afternoon they walked to the breezy 
common on which the light-house stands, 
and dawdled about in the sunshine, gather- 
ing the pale-gray rosemary bloom, and the 
perfumed thyme which grows among those 
hollows and hillocks in such wild luxuriance. 
They were sauntering near the road, talking 
very little; she feeble and tired, although it 
was her own fancy to have walked so far, 
when they saw a carriage driving towards 
them— a large landau, with the usual bony 
horses and shabby, jingling harness, and the 
usual sunburnt, good-tempered driver. 

Two girls in white gowns and Leghorn hats 
were in the carriage, with an elderly woman 
in black. Their laps were full of wild-flow- 
ers, and branches of wild-cherry and pear- 
blossoms filled the leather hood at the back 
of the carriage. They were talking and 
laughing gayly, all animation and high spir- 
its, as they drew near; and at sight of George 
Ransome one of them waved her hand in 
greeting, and called upon the driver to stop. 
They were the two Misses Darcy, the hand- 
some Irish sisters who had made such a sen- 
sation at the Battle of Flowers six weeks be- 
fore. They were spoken of by some people 
as the belles of Nice. Mr. Ransome had pelt- 
ed them with Parma violets and yellow rose^ 


THE FATAL THREE. 


149 


buds on the Promenade des Anglais, as they 
drove up and down in a victoria covered 
with white stocks and narcissi. He had 
walked with them at the Cercle de la Med- 
iterranee and the Palais Tirani ; had admired 
them frankly and openly, not afraid to own 
even to a jealous wife that he thought them 
beautiful. 

Delia Darcy, the older and handsomer ef 
the two, leaned over the carriage door to 
shake hands with him, while Vivien stood 
aloof on a grassy knoll above the road, look- 
ing daggers. What right had they to stop 
their carriage and waylay her husband? 

“ Who would have thought of finding you 
in this out-of-the-way part?” she exclaimed. 
“We fancied you had left the Riviera. Are 
you stopping at Monte Carlo?” 

“No; I have taken a villa at St. Jean.” 

“Is that near here?” 

“Very near. You must have skirted the 
village in driving up here. And has Nice 
been very gay since February?” 

“No; people have been going away, and 
we have missed you dreadfully at the opera, 
and at dances, and at Rumpelmeyer. What 
could have induced you to bury yourself 
alive in a village?” she asked, vivaciously, 
with that sparkling, insinuating manner 
which makes the commonest conversation 
seem a flirtation. 

“My wife has been out of health, and it 
has suited us to live quietly.” 

“Poor Mrs. Ransome — poor you!” ex- 
claimed Miss Darcy, with a moan. “Oh, 
there she is! How do you do, Mrs. Ran- 
some?” gesticulating with a pretty little hand 
in a long wrinkled tan glove. “Do come 
and talk to us.” 

Mrs. Ransome bowed stiffly, but did not 
move an inch. She stood picking a branch 
of rosemary to shreds, with nervous, restless 
fingers, scattering the poor pale, blue-gray 
blossoms as if she were sprinkling them upon 
a corpse. The two girls took no further no- 
tice of her, but both bent forward talking to 
Ransome, rattling on about this ball and the 
other ball, and a breakfast, and sundry af- 
ternoon teas, and the goings on— audacious 
for the most part — of all the smart people at 
Nice. They had worlds to tell him, having 
taken it into their heads that he was a hu- 
morist, a cynic, who delighted in hearing of 
the follies of his fellow-men. He stood with 


his hat off, waiting for the carriage to drive 
on, inwardly impatient of delay, knowing 
with what jealous feelings Vivien had always 
regarded Delia Darcy, dreading a fit of ill- 
temper when the Irish girls should have van- 
ished by-and-by below the sandy edge of the 
common. He listened almost in silence, giv- 
ing their loquacity no more encouragement 
than good manners obliged. 

“Why don’t you come to the next dance 
at the Cercle de la Mediterranee?” said Delia, 
coaxingly ; ‘ ‘ there are so few good dancers 
left, and your step is just the one that suits 
me best. There are to be amateur theatricals 
to begin with — scenes from ‘ Much Ado, ’ and 
I am to 1)6 Beatrice. Won’t that tempt you?’' 
slie asked, wuth the insolence of an acknowl- 
edged beauty, spoiled by the laxer manners 
of a foreign settlement, lolling back in the 
carriage, and smiling at him with brilliant 
Irish gray eyes, under the shadow of her 
Leghorn hat, trimmed with daffodils, a gar- 
den of yellow bloom, showing vividly against 
her dark hair and white gown. 

The other sister was only a paler reflection 
of this one, and echoed her speeches, laugh- 
ing when she laughed. 

“ Surely you will come to see Delia act 
Beatrice?” she said. “I can’t tell you how 
well she does it. Sir Randall Spofforth is 
the Benedict.” 

“My dears, we shall have no time to dress 
for dinner,” expostulated the duenna, feeling 
that this kind of thing had lasted long enough. 
“ Continuez^ cocker." 

“Won’t you come?” pleaded the pertina- 
cious Delia; “it is on the fifteenth, remem- 
ber— next Thursday week. ” 

The carriage rolled slowly onward. 

“I regret that I shall not be there,” said 
Ransome, decisively. 

Delia shook her parasol at him in pretend- 
ed anger. 

He rejoined his wife. She stood surround- 
ed by the shreds of rosemary and thyme 
which she had plucked and scattered while 
he was talking. She was very pale, and he 
knew only too well that she was very an- 
gry- 

“Come, Viva, it is time we turned home- 
ward,” he said. 

“Yes, the sun has gone down, has it not?” 
she exclaimed, mockingly, as she looked after 
the carriage, which sank below the ragged 


150 


THE FATAL THREE. 


edge of heather and thyme yonder, as if it 
had dropped over the cliff. 

“ Why, my love, the sun is still above our 
heads.” 

“ Is it? Tour sun is gone down, anyhow. 
She is very lovely, is she not?” 

The question was asked with sudden eager- 
ness, as if her life depended upon the reply. 

“Yes, they are both handsome girls, feath- 
er-headed, but remarkably handsome.” 

“But Delia is the lovelier. She is your 
divinity.” 

“Yes, she is the lovelier. The other seems 
a copy by an inferior hand.” 

‘ ‘ And she is so fond of you. It -^yas cruel 
to refuse her request, when she pleaded so 
hard.” 

“ How can you talk such nonsense, Vivien? 
Js it impossible for me to talk for five min- 
utes with a handsome girl without unreason- 
able anger on your part?” 

“ Do you expect me to be pleased or hap- 
py when I see your admiration of another 
woman — admiration you do not even take 
the trouble to conceal? Do you suppose I 
can ever forget last winter — how I have seen 
you dancing with that girl, night after night? 
Yes. I have had to sit and watch you. I 
was not popular, I had few partners; and it 
is bad form to dance more than once with 
one’s husband. I have seen her in your arms, 
with her head almost lying on your shoulder, 
again and again, as if it were her natural 
place. ‘What a handsome couple!’ I have 
heard people say; ‘are they engaged?’ Do 
you think that was pleasant for me?” 

“ You had but to say one word and I would 
have left off dancing forever.” 

“Another sacrifice — ^like your marriage.” 

“ Vivien, you would provoke a saint.” - 

“Yes, it is provoking to be chained to 
one woman when you are dying for an- 
other.” 

“ How much oftener am I to swear to you 
that I don’t care a straw for Miss Darcy?” 

“Never again,” she answered. “I love 
you too well to wish you to swear a lie.” 

They had come down from the common 
by this time, and were now upon a path-way 


nearer home— a narrow foot-path on the edge 
of the cliff opposite Beaulieu the gently 
curving bay below them, and behind and 
above them orchards and gardens, hill and 
light-house. It was one of their chosen walks. 
They had paced the narrow path many an 
afternoon when the twin towers of Monaco 
showed dark in the shadow of sundown. 

^ “Vivien, I think you are the most difficult 
creature to live with that ever a man had for 
his wife,” said Ransome, stung to the quick 
by her persistent perversity. 

“I am difficult to live with, am I?” she 
cried. “ Why don’t you go a step farther — 
why don’t you say that you wish that I were 
dead?” she cried, with a wild burst of pas- 
sion. “ Say that you wish me dead. ” 

“I own that when you torment me, as you 
are doing to-day, I have sometimes thought 
of death — yours or mine — as the only chance 
of respite,” he answered, gloomily. 

He had been walking — sauntering slowly 
— a few paces in front of her along the nar- 
row path between the olive garden and the 
edge of the cliff, she following as slowly, 
both in a desultory way, and talking to each 
other without seeing each other’s faces. The 
cliff sank sheer below the path -way, with 
only a narrow margin of rushy grass be- 
tween the foot-path and the brink of the 
precipice. It was no stupendous depth, no 
giddy height from which the eye glanced 
downward, sickening at the horror of the 
gulf. One looked down at the jewel-bright 
waves, and the many-hued rocks, the fir- 
trees growing out of the crags, without a 
thought of danger ; and yet a false step 
upon those sunburnt rushes might mean in- 
stant death. 

He came to a sudden stand-still after that 
last speech, and stood leaning with both 
hands upon his stick, angry, full of gloom, 
feeling that he had said a cruel thing, and 
not repenting of his cruelty. He stood there 
expectant of her angry answer; but there was 
only silence. 

Silence, and then a swift rushing sound, 
like the rustle of a bird’s wings. He looked 
round and saw that he was alone. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


151 


CHAPTER XII. 

DARKNESS. 


She had flung herself over the cliff. That 
rustling noise was the sound of her gown as 
it brushed against the rushes and seedling 
firs that clothed the precipice with verdure. 
He looked over the cliff, and saw her lying 
among the rocks, a white motionless figure, 
mangled and crushed, dead and dumb, his 
victim and his accuser. 

His first impulse was to fling himself over 
the edge where she had cast away her life 
a minute ago; but common-sense overcame 
that movement of despair. A few yards 
farther towards the point, the side of the 
cliff was less precipitous. There were jut- 
ting ledges of rock and grassy knolls by 
which a good climber might let himself 
down to the beach, not without hazard, but 
with a fair chance of safety. As he scram- 
bled downward he saw a fisherman’s boat 
shooting across the bay, and he thought that 
his wife’s fall had been seen from the nar- 
row strip of sandy shore yonder at Beaulieu. 

She was lying on her side among the low 
wet slabs of rock, the blue water lapping 
round her. There was blood upon her face, 
and on one mangled arm, from which the 
muslin sleeve was ripped. Her gown had 
caught in the bushes, and was torn to rib- 
bons ; and the water flowing so gently in and 
out among her loosened hair was tinged with 
blood. 

Her eyes were wide open, staring wildly, 
and they had a glassy look already. He 
knew that she was dead. 

“ Did you see her fall?” he asked the men 
in the boat, as they came near. 

“No,” said one. “I heard the gulls 
scream, and I knew there was something. 
And then I looked about and saw something 
white lying there, under the cliff.” 

They lifted her gently into the boat, and 
laid her on a folded sail at the bottom, as 
gently and as tenderly as if she were still 
capable of feeling, as if she were not past 
cure. George Ransome asked no question, 
invited no opinion. He sat in the stern of 


the boat, dumb and quiet. The horror of 
this sudden doom had paralyzed him. What 
had he done that this thing should happen, 
this wild revenge of a woman’s passionate 
heart which made him a murderer? What 
had he done? Had he not been patient and 
forbearing, indulgent beyond the common in- 
dulgence of husbands to fretful wives? Had 
he not blunted the edge of wrath with soft 
answers? Had he not been affectionate and 
considerate even when love was dead? And 
yet because of one hard speech, wrung from 
his irritated nerves, this wild creature had 
slain herself. 

The two fishermen looked at him curious- 
ly. He saw the dark. Southern eyes watch- 
ing him; saw gravity and restraint upon 
those fine olive faces which had been wont 
to beam with friendly smiles. He knew that 
they suspected some evil, but he was in no 
mood to undeceive them. He sat in an apa- 
thetic silence, motionless, stupefied almost, 
while the men rowed slowly round the point 
in the golden light of sundown. Pie scarcely 
looked at that white, still figure lying at the 
bottom of the boat, the face hidden under a 
scarlet kerchief, which one of the men had 
taken from his neck. He sat staring at the 
rocky shore, the white, gleaming light-house, 
the long ridge of heathy ground on the crest 
of the hill, the villas, the gardens with their 
glow of light and color, the dark masses of 
foliage clustering here and there amid the 
bright -hued rocks. He looked at every- 
thing except his dead wife, lying almost at 
his feet. 

There was an inquiry that evening before 
the Juge d’Instruction at Villefranche, and he 
was made to give an account of his wife’s 
death. He proved a very bad witness. The 
minute and seemingly frivolous questions ad- 
dled his brain. He told the magistrate how 
he had looked round and found the path 
empty; but he could not say how his wife 
had fallen whether she had flung herself 


152 


THE FATAL THREE. 


over the edge or had fallen accidentally, 
whether her foot had slipped unawares, 
whether she had fallen face forward, or 
whether she had dropped backward from 
the edge of the cliff. 

“I tell you again that I did not see her 
fall,” he protested impatiently. 

“ Did you always walk in advance of your 
wife?” asked the Frenchman. “It was 
not very polite to turn your back upon a 
lady.” 

“ I was worried, and out of temper.” 

“ For what reason?” 

“My wife’s jealous temper created reasons 
where there were none. The people who 
know me know that I was not habitually un- 
kind to her.” 

“Yet you gave her an answer which so 
maddened her that she flung herself over the 
cliff in her despair?” 

“ I fear that it was so,” he answered, with 
the deepest distress depicted in his haggard 
face. “She was in a nervous and irritable 
condition. I had always borne that fact in 
mind until that moment. She stung me past 
endurance by her groundless jealousies. I 
had been a true and loyal husband to her 
from the hour of our marriage. I had never 
wronged her by so mueh as a thought, and 
yet I could not talk to a pretty peasant girl, 
or confess my admiration for a woman of 
quality, without flinging her into a rage that 
was almost madness. I bore with her' long 
and patiently. I remembered that the cir- 
cumstanees of her childhood and youth had 
been adverse, that her nature had been warp- 
ed and perverted; I forgave all faults of 
temper in a wife who loved me ; but this af- 
ternoon — almost for the first time since our 
marriage— I spoke unkindly, cruelly perhaps. 
I have no wish to avoid interrogation or to 
conceal any portion of the truth.” 

“You did not push her over the cliff?” 

“I did not. Do I look like a murderer, or 
bear the character of a man likely to commit 
murder?” 

The examination went on with cruel reiter- 
ation of almost the same questions. The 
Juge d’Instruction was a dull, plodding soul, 
who believed that the truth might be wrung 
out of a criminal by persistent questioning. 
He suspeeted Ransome, or deemed it his 
duty to suspeet him, and he ordered him to 
be arrested on leaving the court; so George 


Ransome passed the night after his wife’s 
death in the lock-up at Villefranche. 

What a night that was for a man to live 
through ! He sat on a stone bench listening 
to the level plish-plash of that tideless sea 
ever so far beneath him. He heard the foot- 
steps going up and down the steep stony 
street of that wonderful old seaport; he heard 
the cry of the gulls, and the striking of the 
clock on the crest of the hill, as he sat mo- 
tionless in a crouching attitude, with his el- 
bows on his knees, and his head in his hands, 
brooding over that swift, sudden horror of 
yesterday. 

Could it have been an accident? Did she 
step backward unawares and slip over the 
edge? No, he remembered where she was 
standing when he last looked at her, some 
distance from the side of the cliff, standing 
among the heather and wild thyme which 
grew down to the edge of the little path. 
She must have made a rapid rush to the 
brink after that fatal speech of his. She had 
flung her life away in a single impulse of 
blind, mad anger — or despair. She had not 
paused for an instant to take thought. Alas! 
he knew her so well; he had so often seen 
those sudden gusts of passion; the rush of 
crimson to the pale small face ; the quivering 
lips striving impotently for speech ; the fury 
in the dark eyes, and the small nervous hands 
clinched convulsively. He had seen her 
struggle with the demon of anger, and had 
seen the storm pass swifter than a tempest- 
driven cloud across the moon. Another mo- 
ment and she would burst into tears, fling 
her arms round his deck, and implore him to 
forgive her. 

“ I love you too well ever to know happi- 
ness,” she said. 

That was her chief apology. 

“It is only people without passions who 
can be happy, ” she told him once. ‘ ‘ I some- 
times think that you belong to that family.” 

And she was dead, she whose undisciplined 
love had so plagued and tried him; she was 
dead, and he felt himself her murderer. 

Alas 1 doubly a murderer, since she had 
perished just at that time when her life 
should have been most precious to him, 
when he should have made any sacrifice to 
secure her peace. He who had seen all the 
evils of a fretful temper exhibited in her 
character had yet been weak enough to yield 


THE FATAL THREE. 


153 


to a moment of anger, and to insult the wom- 
an whom he ought to have cherished. 

A long-familiar line of Byron’s haunted his 
brain all through the night, and mixed itself 
with that sound of footsteps on the street of 
stairs, and the scream of the gulls, and the 
flapping of the waves against the stone quay. 

“ She died, but not alone—’’ 

She who was to have been the mother of 
his first-born child was lying dead in the 
white-walled villa where they had once been 
so happy. 

Hush!, In the soft, clear light of an April 
morning he heard the tolling of the church 
bell, solemn, slow, measured, at agonizing in- 
tervals, which left an age of expectancy be- 
tween the heavy strokes of the clapper. 

Sdbbata pango,fulgurafrango,funera 'plan- 
go. 

They bury their dead at daybreak in that 
fair land of orange and lemon groves — in the 
early morning of the first day after death the 
hastily fashioned coffin is carried out into 
the sunshine, and the little procession of 
mourners winds slowly up the hill towards 
the little graveyard near the church of Ville- 
franche. George Ransome knows how brief 
is the interval between death and burial on 
that Southern shore, and he has little doubt 
that the bell is tolling for her whose heart 
was beating passionately when the sun began 
to sink. 

So soon ! Her grave would be filled in and 
trodden down before they let him out of 
prison. 

It had never seemed to him that he was to 
stay long in captivity, or that there could be 
any difficulty in proving his innocence of any 
part in the catastrophe, except that fatal part 
of having upset the balance of the weak 
mind, and provoked a passionate woman to 
suicide. As for the confinement of the past 
night, he had scarcely thought about it. He 
had a curious semiunconsciousness of time 
and place which was a new experience to 
him. He found himself forgetting where he 
was, and what had happened. There were 
strange gaps in his mind — intervals of obliv- 
ion — and then there were periods in which he 
sat looking at the slanting shaft of sunlight 
between the window and the ground, and try- 
ing to count the motes that danced in that 
golden haze. 


The day passed strangely too— sometimes 
at railroad pace, sometimes with a ghastly 
slowness. Then came a night in which sleep 
never visited his eyelids — a night of bodily 
and mental restlessness, the greater part of 
which he spent in futile efforts to open the 
heavily bolted door, or to drag the window- 
bars from their stone sockets. His prison 
was a relic of the Middle Ages, and Hercules 
himself could not have got out of it. 

In all those endeavors he was actuated by 
a blind impulse— a feverish desire to be at 
large again. Kot once duringthat night did he 
think of his dead wife in her new-made grave 
on the side of the hill. He had forgotten why 
they had shut him up in that stony chamber, 
or rather had imagined another reason for his 
imprisonment. 

He was a political offender, had been deep- 
ly concerned in a plot to overthrow Victor 
Emmanuel, and to create a republic for Italy. 
He himself was to be president of that re- 
public; he felt all the power to rule and legis- 
late for a great nation. He compared himself 
with Solon and with Pericles, to the disad- 
vantage of both ; there was a greatness in him 
which neither of those had ever attained. 

“I should rule them as God himself,” he 
thought. “It would be a golden age of 
truth and justice, a millennium of peace and 
plenty; and while the nations are waiting 
for me I am shut up here by the treachery of 
France.” 

Next morning he was taken before the .luge 
d’Instruction for the second time. The two 
fishermen who picked up his wife’s corpse 
were present as witnesses ; also his wife’s 
maid and the three other servants; also his 
wife’s doctor. 

He was again questioned severely, but this 
time nothing could induce him to give a di- 
rect answer to any question. He raved about 
the Italian republic of which he was to be 
chief. He told the ^French magistrate that 
France had conspired with the Italian tyrant 
to imprison and suppress him. 

“Every other pretence is a subterfuge,” 
he said. “ My popularity in Italy is at the 
root of this monstrous charge. There will 
be a rising of the whole nation if you do not 
instantly release me; for your own sake, sir, 
I warn you to be prompt.” 

“This man is pretending to be mad,” said 
the magistrate. 


154 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“ I fear there is more reality than pretence 
about the business," said the doctor. 

He took Ransometo the window and looked 
at his eyes in the strong white light of noon, 
then he went over to the magistrate and they 
whispered together for some minutes, while 
the prisoner sat staring at the floor and mut- 
tering to himself. 

After that there came a long, dark interval 
in George Ransome’s life — a waking dream 
of intolerable length, but not unalloyed mis- 
ery; for the hallucinations which made his 
madness buoyed him up and sustained him 
during some part of that dark period. He 
talked with princes and statesmen; he was 
not alone in the mad-house chamber, or in 
the mad-house garden, or in that great iron 
cage where even the most desperate maniacs 
were allowed to disport themselves in the air 
and the sunlight as in a gymnasium. He was 
surrounded by invisible friends and flatter- 
ers, by public functionaries who quailed be- 
fore his glance and were eager to obey his 
commands. Sometimes he wrote letters and 
telegrams all day long upon any scraps of 
paper which his keepers would give him; 
sometimes he passed whole days in a dreamy 
silence, with arms folded, and abstracted gaze 
fixed on the distant hill-tops, like Napoleon 
at St. Helena, brooding over the future of 
nations. 

By-and-by there came a period of improve- 
ment, or what was called improvement by the 
doctors, but which to the patient seemed a 
time of strange blankness and disappoint- 
ment. All those busy shadows which had 
peopled his life— his senators and flatterers — 
had left him; he was alone in that strange 
place amid a strange people, most of whom 
seemed to be somewhat wrong in their heads. 
He was able to read the newspapers now, and 
was vexed to find that his speeches were un- 
reported, his letters and manifestoes unpub- 
lished; disappointed to find that Victor Em- 
manuel was still King of Italy, and the new 
republic still a web of dreams. 

His temper was very fitful at this time, and 
he had intervals of violence. One morning 
he found himself upon the hills, digging, 
with half a dozen other men, young and old, 
dressed pretty much like himself. It was in 
the early summer morning, before the sun 
had made the world too hot for labor. It 
was rapture to him to be there, digging, and 


running about on the dewy hill-side, in an 
amphitheatre of mountains, high above the 
stony bed of the Paillon. The air was full 
of sweet odors — orange and lemon bloom, 
roses and lilies from the gardens and or- 
chards below. He felt that earth and sky 
were rapturously lovely, that life was a bless- * 
ing and a privilege beyond all words. He 
had not the consciousness of a single care, 
or even a troubled memory; his quarrel with 
his father, his self-imposed exile, his mar- 
riage and its bitter disillusions, his wife’s 
tragical fate, all were forgotten. He felt as a 
sylph might feel — a creature without earthly 
obligations, revelling in the glory of nature. 

This new phase of being lasted so long as 
the hills and the sky wore their aspect of 
novelty. It was succeeded by a period of 
deepest depression — a melancholy which 
weighed him down like a leaden burden. 
He sat in the mad-house garden apart from 
the rest, brooding over the darkness of life. 
He had no hopes, no desires. 

Gradually memory began to return. He 
asked why his wife did not go to see him. 

“ She used to be so fond of me,” he said, 
“foolishly fond of me; and now she deserts 
me.” 

Then he talked of going home again. 
The image of his latest dwelling-place had 
gradually shaped itself in his mind. He saw 
the hedges of pale amber roses, the carouba- 
trees, dark against the glittering blue of the 
sea, which shone through every opening in 
the branches, like a background of jewels, 
and the great rugged sandy mountains rising 
steeply up towards the sky above the low 
curving shore, with patches of olive here 
and there on their stony flanks, but for the 
most part bare and barren, reddish-yellow, 
steeped in sunlight. 

Yes, he remembered every feature of that 
lovely and varied scene. The village of Eze 
yonder on the cornice road — a cluster of 
stony dwellings perched upon rocky foun- 
dations, hardly to be distinguished from the 
rough crags upon which they were built — 
and higher still, in a cleft of those yellow 
hills, mediaeval La Turbie, with church and 
citadel, on the road by which Caesar and his 
legions had marched to conquest. How 
lovely it all was, and how pleasant it had 
been to lounge in his garden, where the light 
looked dazzling on beds of white gilliflowers. 


155 


THE FATAL THREE. 


and where the blue summer sea smiled in the 
far distance, with a faint purple cloud yonder 
on the horizon which represented Corsica! 

Why had he ever left that familiar home? 
Why could he not return to it? 

“Get me a carriage,” he said to one of the 
attendants ; “ I want to go home immediate- 
ly. My wife is waiting for me.” 

It is not customary to make explanations 
to madmen even in the best-regulated asy- 
lums. Nobody answered him; nobody ex- 
plained anything to him. He found himself 
confronted with a blank, dogged silence. He 
wore himself out in an agony of impatience, 
like a bird beating itself to death against its 
bars. He languished in a miserable igno- 
rance, piecing his past life together bit by 
bit, a strange interweaving of fancies and 
realities, until by slow degrees the fancies 
dropped out of the web and left him face to 
face with the truth. 

At last the record of the past was com- 
plete. He knew that his wife was dead, 
and remembered how she had died. He 
knew that he had been a prisoner, first in 
jail, and then in a lunatic asylum; but he 
did not acknowledge to himself that he had 
been mad. He remembered the bell tolling 
in the saffron light of dawn ; he remembered 
the magistrate’s exasperating questions; he 
remembered everything. 

He sank into a state of despairing sullen- 
ness after this, and silence and apathy were 
accepted as the indications of cure. He was 
told by the head physician that he could 
leave the institution whenever he pleased. 
There was an account against him as a pri- 
vate patient, which had been guaranteed by 


his landlord, who knew him to be a man of 
some means. His German man-servant had 
been to the asylum many times to inquire 
about him. The physician recommended 
him to travel in Switzerland until the end of 
the autumn, and to take this servant as his 
attendant and courier. “ Change of air and 
scene will be of inestimable advantage to 
you,” said the doctor; “but it would not be 
wise for you to travel alone.” 

“What month is it?” 

“September — the twenty-second.” 

“And my wife died early in April,” he 
said. “Only a few months; and it seems 
to me as if I had been ages in this place.” 

He took the doctor’s advice — re-engaged 
Gustav Laube as his servant and courier. 
He cared very little where he went or what 
became of him. Life and the world, his own 
individuality, and the beautiful earth around 
and about him were alike indifferent to him. 
He went back to the villa at St. Jean, and to 
the garden he had loved so well in the bright 
fresh spring-time. All things had an over- 
grown and neglected look in the ripeness of 
expiring summer; too many flowers, a rank 
luxuriance of large leaves and vivid blos- 
soms ; fruit rotting in the long grass ; an odor 
of decaying oranges, the waste of the last 
harvest. He went up to the graveyard on 
the hill above the harbor. It was not a 
picturesque burial-place. The cemetery at 
Cimies was far more beautiful. The cem- 
etery at Nice was in a grander position. 

He felt a little sorry that she should lie 
here, amid the graves of sailors and fisher- 
men, as if even after death she was slighted 
and hardly used. 


BOOK IIL—ATKOPOS ; OB, THAT WHICH MUST BE. 


CHAPTER I. 

THE GRAVE ON THE HILL. 


After that visit to the great white bar- 
rack on the road to St. Andre, Mildred felt 
that her business at Nice was finished, there 
was nothing more for her to learn. She 
knew all the sad story now — all, except those 
lights and shadows of the picture which only 
the unhappy actor in that domestic tragedy 
could have told her. The mystery of that 
fatal past had unfolded itself, stage by stage, 
from that Sunday afternoon when Cesare 
Castellani came to Enderby Manor. The 
curtain was lifted. There was no more to 
be done; and yet Mildred lingered at Nice, 
loving the place and its environs a little for 
their own beauty, and feeling a strange and 
sorrowful interest in the scene of her hus- 
band’s misfortunes. 

There was another reason for remaining in 
the gay white city in the fact that Lady 
Lochinvar had taken a fancy to Mis^ Ran- 
some, and that the young lady seemed to be 
achieving a remarkably rapid cure of her in- 
fatuation for the Italian. It may have been 
because at the Palais Montano she met a 
good many Italians, and that the charm of 
that nationality became less potent with fa- 
miliarity. There was music, too, at the Pa- 
lais, and to spare, according to Mr. Stuart, 
who was not an enthusiast, and was wont to 
shirk his aunt’s musical reunions. 

Mildred was delighted to see her husband’s 
niece entering society under such agreeable 
auspices. She went out with her occasion- 
ally, just enough to let the world see she was 
not indifferent to her charge’s happiness, and 
for the rest Lady Lochinvar and Mrs. Mur- 
ray were always ready to chaperon the nice, 
frank, bright girl, who was much admired 
by the best people, and was never at a loss for 
partners at dances whoever else might play 
wallflower. 


Mrs. Greswold invited Mr. and Mrs. Mur- 
ray and Malcolm Stuart to a quiet little din- 
ner at. the Westminster, and the impression 
the young man made upon Mildred’s mind 
was altogether favorable. He was certainly 
not handsome, but his plainness was of an 
honest Scottish type, and his freckled com- 
plexion and blue eyes, sandy hair and mus- 
tache, were altogether different from the 
Judas red of Castellani’s auburn beard and 
hazel eyes. Truth and honesty beamed in 
the Scotchman’s open countenance. He 
looked like a soldier and a gentleman. 

That he admired Pamela was obvious to the 
most unobservant eye; that she affected to 
look down upon him was equally obvious; 
but it might be that her good-humored scorn 
of him was more pretence tluin reality. She 
made light of him openly as one of that in- 
ferior race of men whose minds never soar 
above the stable and the gunroom, or the 
home farm, and whose utmost intellectual 
ingenuity culminates in the invention of a 
salmon -fly or a new fertilizer for turnip 
fields. 

“You are just like my brother-in-law, 
Henry Mountford,” she told him. 

‘ ‘ From the air with which you say that, 
I conclude Sir Henry Mountford must be a 
very inferior person.” 

“ Not at all. He is the kind of man whom 
all other men seem to respect. I believe he 
is one of the best shots in England. His 
bags are written about in the newspapers; 
and I wonder there are any pigeons left in the 
world, considering the way he has slaugh- 
tered them.” 

“ I saw him shoot at Monte Carlo the year 
before last.” 

“Yes, he went there and back in a week 
on purpose to shoot. Imagine any man going 


THE FATAL THREE. 


157 


to this divine Riviera, this land of lemon 
groves and palms, and roses and violets, just 
to slaughter pigeons!” 

“ He won the Grand Prix. It was a pret- 
ty big feather in his cap,” said Mr. Murray. 
‘ ‘ Am I to conclude that you dislike sport- 
ing men?” 

“ I prefer men who cultivate their minds,” 

“ Ah, but a man who shoots straight and 
rides straight, and can land a big salmon, 
and knows how to manage a farm, cannot 
be altogether an imbecile. I never knew a 
really fine rider yet who was a fool; good 
horsemanship needs so many qualities that 
fools don’t possess; and to be a crack shot, 
I assure you that a man must have some 
brains and a good deal of perseverance; and 
perseverance is not a bad thing in its way. 
Miss Ransome.” 

He looked at her with a certain significance 
in his frank blue eyes, looked at lier reso- 
lutely, as some bold young Vandal or Visi- 
goth might have looked at a Roman maiden 
whom he meant to subjugate. 

'‘I did not say that sportsmen were fools,” 
she answered, sharply. “I only say that the 
kind of man I respect is the man whose 
pleasures are those of the intellect — who is 
in the front rank among the thinkers of his 
age — who — ” 

“ Reads Darwin and the German metaphy- 
sicians, I suppose. I tried Darwin to see if he 
could-belp me in my farming — but I can’t say 
I got very much out of him in that line. 
There’s more in old Virgil for an agricultur- 
ist. I’m not a reading man, you see, Miss 
Ransome. I find by the time I’ve read the 
daily papers my thirst for knowledge is pret- 
ty nearly satisfied; there’s such a lot of in- 
formation in the London papers; and when 
you add the Figaro and the New York Herald, 
there’s not much left for a man to learn. I 
generally read the Quarterlies — as a duty — 
to discover how many dull books have 
enriched the world during the last three 
months.” 

“'That’s a great deal more reading than 
my brother-in-law gets through. He makes a 
great fuss about his Times every morning; 
but I believe he seldom goes beyond the births, 
deaths, and marriages, or a report of a billiard 
match. He reads the Field, as a kind of re- 
ligion, and ‘Baily’s Magazine,’ and I think 
that’s all.” 


“ Do you like men who write books, Miss 
Ransome, as well as men who read them?” 

Pamela crimsoned to the roots of her hair 
at this most innocent question. Malcolm 
Stuart marked that blush with much per- 
plexity. 

“When one is interested in a book one 
likes to know the author,” she replied, with 
cautious vagueness. 

“ Do you know many writers?” 

“Not many — in fact, only one.” 

“Who is he?” 

“Mr. Castellani, the author of ‘Nepen- 
the.’” 

“‘Nepenthe?’ — ah, that’s a novel people 
were talking about some time ago. My aunt 
was full of it, because she fancied it embodied 
some of her own ideas. She wanted me to 
read it. I tried a few chapters,” said Mal- 
colm, making a wry face. “ Sickly stuff.” 

“People who are not in the habit of read- 
ing the literature of imagination ean hardly 
understand such a book as ‘Nepenthe,’” re- 
plied Pamela, severely. “They are out of 
touch with the spirit and atmosphere of the 
book.” 

“ One has to be trained up to that kind of 
thing, I suppose. One must forget that two 
and two njake four in order to get into the 
proper frame of mind, eh? Is the author of 
‘ Nepenthe ’ an interesting man?” 

He was shrewd enough to interpret the^ 
blush aright. The author of “Nepenthe” 
was a person to be dreaded by any aspirant 
to Miss Ransome’s favor. 

“He is like his book,” answered Pamela, 
briefly. 

“ Is he a young man?” 

“I don’t know your idea of youth. He is 
older than my aunt — about five-and-thirty.” 

Stuart was just thirty. One point in his 
favor, anyhow, he told himself, not knowing 
that to a romantic girl years may be inter- 
esting. 

“ Handsome?” 

“ That is always a matter of opinion. He 
is just the kind of man who ought to have 
written ‘Nepenthe.’ That is really all I can 
tell you,” said Pamela, with some irritation. 
“ I believe Lady Lochinvar knew Mr. Castel- 
lani when he was a very young man. She 
can satisfy your curiosity about him.” 

“lam really not curious. Castellani ? An 
Italian, I suppose, one of my aunt’s numerous 


158 


THE FATAL THREE. 


geniuses. She has a genius for discovering 
geniuses. When I see her with a new one I 
am always reminded of a child with a toy 
balloon. So pretty— till it bursts.” 

Pamela turned her back upon him in a rage, 
and went over to the piano to talk to Mrs. 
Murray, who was preparing to sing one of 
her repertoire of five Scotch ballads. 

“Shall it be ‘Gin a body’ or ‘Hunting- 
tower?’ ” she asked, meekly, and nobody vol- 
unteering a decisive opinion, she chirruped 
the former coquettish little ballad, and put a 
stop to social intercourse for five minutes. 

After that evening Mr. Stuart knew who 
his rival was, and with what kind of influ- 
ence he had to contend. An author, a musi- 
cal man, a genius! Well, he had very few 
weapons with which to fight such an antag- 
onist, he who was neither musical, nor liter- 
ary, nor gifted with any of the graces which 
recommend a lover to a sentimental girl. 
But he was a man, and he meant to win her. 
He admired her for her frank young pretti- 
ness, so unsophisticated and girlish, and for 
that perfect freshness and truthfulness of 
mind which made all her thoughts transpar- 
ent. He wafe too much a man of the world 
to ignore the fact that Miss Ransome, of Ma- 
pledown, would be a very good match for 
him, or that such a marriage would strength- 
en his position in his aunt’s esteem. Women 
bow down to success. Encouraged by these 
considerations Mr. Stuart pursued the even 
tenor of his way, and was not disheartened by 
the idea of the author of “Nepenthe,” more 
especially as that attractive personage was 
not on the ground. He had one accomplish- 
ment over and above the usual out-door ex- 
ercises of a country gentleman. He could 
dance, and he was Pamela’s favorite partner 
wherever she went. No one else waltzed as 
well— not even the most gifted of her Ger- 
man acquaintance, not even the noble Span- 
iards who were presented to her. 

He had another and still greater advantage 
in the fact that he was«;ftften in the young 
lady’s society. She was fond of Lady Loch- 
invar, and spent a good deal of her life at the 
Palais Montano, where, with Mrs. Murray’s 
indefatigable assistance, there were tennis 
parties twice a week. That charming garden, 
with its numerous summer - houses, made a 
kind of club for the chosen few ji^ho had les 
^etites entrees. 


While Pamela was enjoying the lovely 
spring-tide among people whose only thought 
was of making the best of life, and getting 
the maximum of sunshine, Mildred Greswold 
spent her days in sad musings upon an irrev- 
ocable past. It was her melancholy pleas- 
ure to revisit again and again the place in 
which her husband had lived, the picturesque 
little village under the shadow of the tall cliff, 
every path- way which he must have trodden, 
every point from which he must have gazed 
seaward or landward in his troubled reveries. 

She dwelt with morbid persistence on the 
thought of those two lives, both dear to her, 
yet in their union how terrible a curse 1 She 
revisited the villa until the old care-taker grew 
to look upon her as a heaven-sent benefac- 
tress, and until the village children christened 
her the English Madonna — that pensive look 
recalling the face of the statue in the church 
yonder, so mildly sad — a look of ineffable 
sweetness tinged with pain. She sat for 
hours at a stretch in the sunlit garden, among 
such flowers as must have been blooming 
there in those closing hours of Fay’s wedded 
life, when the shadow of her cruel fate was 
darkening round her, though she knew it not. 
She talked to people who had known the 
English lady. Alas! they were all dubious 
in their opinions. None would answer bold- 
ly for the husband’s innocence. They shrug- 
ged their shoulders — they shook their heads. 
Who could say? Only the good God would 
ever know the truth about that story. 

The place to which she went oftenest was 
the burial ground on the hill, where Fay’s 
grave, with its white marble cross, occupied 
one of the highest points in the enclosure, 
and stood out against the cloudless sapphire, 
sharp and clear. 

The inscription on the marble was of the 
briefest: 

“ Vivien Ransome, 

Died, April 24th, 1868. 

Deeply lamented.” 

Below the cross stretched the grass mound, 
without shrub or flower. It was Mildred’s 
task to beautify this neglected grave. She 
brought a florist from the neighborhood to 
carry out her own idea, and on her instruction 
he removed the long, rank grass from the 
mound, and planted a cross of roses, eight 
feet long, dwarf bush-roses closely planted. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


159 


Gloire de Dijon and Marechale Niel, with 
an intermixture of pure white and delicate 
blush. 

She remembered how Fay had revelled in 
the rose-garden at The Hook, where midsum- 


mer was a kind of carnival of roses. Here 
the roses would bloom all the year round, 
and there would be perpetual perfume and 
blossom and color above poor Fay’s cold 
dust. 


CHAPTER II. 

PAMELA CHANGES HER MIND. 


Lucifer himself, after his fall, could not 
have felt worse than Cesare Castellani when 
he followed Mildred Greswold to Nice, as he 
did within a week after she left Pallanza. 

He went to Nice partly because he was an 
idle man, and had no desire to go back to 
English east winds just at this season when 
the glory of the southern spring-tide was be- 
ginning. He was tolerably well furnished 
with money, and Nice was as good to him as 
any other place, while the neighborhood of 
Monte Carlo was always an attraction. He 
followed in Mildred’s footsteps, therefore, but 
he had no idea of forcing himself upon her 
presence for some time to come. He knew 
that his chances were ruined in that quarter 
for the time being, if not forever. 

This was his first signal overthrow. Easy 
conquests had so demoralized him that he 
had grown to consider all conquests easy. 
He had unlimited faith in the charm of his 
own personality — his magnetic power as he 
called it; and, behold! his magnetic power 
had failed utterly with this lovely, lonely 
woman, who should have turned to him in 
her desolation as the flowers turn to the sun. 

For once in his life he had overrated him- 
self and his influence, and in so doing he had 
lost. the chance of a very respectable alliance. 

“ Fifteen hundred a year would be at least 
bread and cheese,” he reflected, “and to mar- 
ry an English heiress of a good old family 
would solidify my position in soeiety. The 
girl is pretty enough, and I could twist her 
round my finger. She would bore me fright- 
fully, but every man must suffer something. 
There is always a discord somewhere amid 
the harmony of life; and if one’s teeth are 
not too often set on edge one should be con- 
tent.” 

He remembered how contemptuously he 


had rejected the idea of such a marriage in 
his talk with Miss Fausset, and how she had 
been set upon it. 

“I should stand ever so much better with 
her if I married well, and solidified myself 
into British respectability. I might natural- 
ize myself, and go into Parliament, perhaps, 
if that would please the good soul at Brigh- 
ton. What will she leave me when she dies, 
I wonder? She is muter than the Sphinx 
upon that point. And will she ever die? 
Brighton is famous for pauper females of 
ninety and upward, and a woman like Miss 
Fausset, who lives in cotton- wool, and who 
has long done with the cares and passions of 
life, might last a century. I don’t see any 
brilliancy in the prospect there; but so long 
as I please her, and do well in the world, she 
will no doubt be generous.” 

He told himself that it was essential he 
should make some concessions to Miss Faus- 
set’s prejudices now that he had failed with 
Mildred. So long as he had hoped to win 
that nobler prize he had been careless how 
he had jeopardized the favor of his elderly 
patroness. But now he felt that her favor 
was all in all to him, and that the time for 
trifling had gone by. 

She had been very generous to him during 
the years that had gone by since she first 
came to his aid almost unasked, and helped 
him to pay his college debts. She had come 
to the rescue many times since that juvenile 
entanglement, and her patience had been 
great. Yet she had not failed to remonstrate 
with him at every fresh instance of folly and 
self-indulgent extravagance. She had talked 
to him with an unflinching directness; she 
had refused further help; but somehow she 
had always given way, and the check had 
been written. 


160 


THE FATAL THREE. 


Again and again she had warned him that 
there were limits even to her forbearance. 

“If I saw you working earnestly and in- 
dustriously, I should not mind, even if you 
were a failure,” said his benefactress, se- 
verely. 

“I have worked, and I have produced a 
book which was not a failure,” replied Casare, 
with his silkiest air. 

“ One book in a decade of so-called literary 
lifel Did the success of that book result in 
the payment of a single debt?” 

“Dearest lady, would you have a man 
waste his own earnings — the first-fruits of 
his pen— -the grains of fairy gold that filtered 
through the mystic web of his fancy — would 
you have him fritter away that sacred prod- 
uct upon importunate hosiers or threatening 
bootmakers ? That money was altogether 
precious to me. I kept it in my waistcoat- 
pocket as long as ever I could. The very 
touch of the coin thrilled me. I believe cab- 
men and crossing sweepers had most of it in 
the end,” he concluded, with a regretful sigh. 

Miss Fausset had borne with his idleness 
and his vanity as indulgent mothers bear 
with their sons; but he felt that she was be- 
ginning to tire of him. There were reasons 
why she should always continue forbearing; 
but he wanted to insure himself something 
better than reluctant aid. 

These considerations being taken into ac- 
count, Mr. Castellani was fain to own tq him- 
self that he had been a fool in rejecting the 
substance for the shadow, however alluring 
the lovely shade might be. 

“But I loved her,” he sighed, “ I loved her 
as I had never loved until I saw her fair 
Madonna face amid the century-old peace of 
her home. She filled my life with a new 
element. She purified and exalted my whole 
being. And she is thrice as rich as that 
silly prattling girl!” He ground his teeth at 
the remembrance of his failure. There had 
been no room for doubt. Those soft violet 
eyes had been transformed by indignation, 
and had flashed upon him with angry fire. 
That fair Madonna face had whitened to 
marble with suppressed passion. Not by one 
glance, not by one tremor in the contemptu- 
ous voice, had the woman he loved acknowl- 
edged his influence. 

He put up at the Cosmopolitan, got in 
half a dozen French novels of the most ad- 


vanced school from Galignani, and kept him- 
self very close for a week or two; but he 
contrived to find out what the ladies at the 
Westminster were doing through Albrecht, 
the courier, who believed him to be Miss 
Ransome’s suitor, and was inclined to be 
communicative, after being copiously treated 
to locks, or petits verves, as the occasion might 
suggest. 

From Albrecht Castellani heard how Miss 
Ransome spent most of her time at the Palais 
Montano, or gadding about with her lady- 
ship and Mrs. Murray; how, in Albrecht's 
private opinion, the balls and other dissipa- 
tions of Nice were turning that young lady’s 
head; how Mrs. Greswold went for lonely 
drives day after day, and would not allow 
Albrecht to show her the beauties of the 
neighborhood, which it would have been alike 
his duty and pleasure to have done. He had 
ascertained that her favorite, and, indeed, 
habitual, drive was to St. Jean, where she 
was in the habit of leaving the fly at the lit- 
tle inn while she strolled about the village 
in a purposeless manner. All this appeared 
to Albrecht as eccentric and absurd, and be- 
neath a lady of Mrs. Greswold’s position. 
She would have employed her time to more 
advantage in going on distant excursions in 
a carriage and pair, and in lunching at re- 
mote hotels, where Albrecht would have been 
sure of a bonne main from a gratifled land- 
lord, as well as his commission from the liv- 
ery stable. 

Castellani heard with displeasure of Pa- 
mela’s dancings and junketings, and he de- 
cided that it was time to throw himself 
across her path-way. He had not been pre- 
pared to find that she could enjoy life with- 
out him — her admiration of him had been 
so transparent, her sentimental fancy so naive- 
ly revealed— and he had thought himself the 
sultan of her heart, having only to throw the 
handkerchief whenever it might suit him to 
claim his prey. Much as he prided himself 
upon his knowledge of the female heart, he 
had never estimated the fickleness of a shal- 
low, sentimental character like Pamela’s. No 
man, with a due regard to the value and dig- 
nity of his sex, could conceive the rapidity 
or the ruthlessness with which a young lady 
of this temperament will transfer her affec- 
tions and her large assortment of day-dreams 
and romantic fancies from one man to an- 


THE FATAL THREE. 


161 


other. No man could conceive her capacity 
for admiring in Number Two all those qual- 
ities which were lacking in Number One. 
No man could imagine the exquisite adapta- 
bility of girlhood to surrounding circum- 
stances. 

Had Castellani taken Miss Ransome when 
she was in the humor he would have found 
her the most amiable and yielding of wives— 
a model English wife, ready to adapt herself 
in all things to the will and the pleasure of 
her husband ; unselfish, devoted, unassailable 
in her belief in her husband as the first and 
best of men. But he had not seized his op- 
portunity. He had allowed nearly a month 
to go by since his defeat at Pallanza; and he 
had allowed Pamela to discover that life 
might be endurable, nay, even pleasant, with- 
out him. 

And now, hearing that the young lady was 
gadding about, and divining that such gad- 
ding was the high-road to forgetfulness, Mr. 
Castellani made up his mind to resume his 
sway over Miss Ransome’s fancy without 
loss of time. He called upon a dashing 
American matron whom he had visited in 
London and Paris, and who was now the 
occupant of a villa on the Promenade des 
Anglais, and in her drawing-room he fell in 
with several of his London acquaintances. 
He found, however, that his American friend, 
Mrs. Montagu Brown, had not yet succeeded 
in being invited to the Palais Montano, and 
only knew Lady Lochinvar and Miss Ran- 
some by sight. 

“Her ladyship is too stand-offish for my 
taste,” said Mrs. Montagu Brown, “but the 
girl seems friendly enough— no style— not as 
we Americans understand style. I am told 
she ranks as an heiress in her own country, 
but at the last ball at the Cercle she wore a 
frock that I should call dear at forty dollars. 
That young Stuart is after her, evidently. I 
hope you are going to the dance next Tues- 
day, Mr. Castellani. I want some one nice 
to talk to now my waltzing days are over.” 

Castellani urged that Mrs. Montagu Brown 
was in the heyday of a dancer’s age, and 
would be guilty of gross cruelty in abandon- 
ing that delightful art. 

“Don’t talk bosh!” said Mrs. Montagu 
Brown, with perfect good-humor. “There 
are plenty of women who don’t know when 
they’re old, but every woman knows when 

n 


she’s fat. When my waist came to twenty- 
eight inches I knew it was time to leave off 
waltzing; and I was pretty good at it too in 
my day, I can tell you.” 

“With that carriage you must have been 
divine,” replied Cesare ; “and I believe the 
Venus de Milo’s waist must measure over 
twenty-eight inches.” 

“The Venus de Milo has no more figure 
than the peasant woman one sees on the 
promenade — women who seem as if they set 
their faces against the very idea of a waist. 
Be sure you get a ticket for Tuesday. I love 
to have some clever men about me wherever 
I go.” 

“ I shall be there,” said Castellani, bending 
over his hostess, and imparting a gentle, con- 
fidential pressure to her fat white hand by 
way of leave-taking before he slipped silent- 
ly from the room. 

He had studied the art of departure as if it 
were a science; never lingered, never hemmed 
and hawed, never said he must go and didn’t, 
never apologized for going so soon while ev- 
erybody was pining to get rid of him. 

The next day there was a Battle of Flow- 
ers; not the great floral fete before the sugar- 
plum carnival, but the altogether secondary 
affair of Mid-Lent — pleasant enough in the 
warmer weather of advancing spring. 

Every one of any importance was on the 
promenade, and among the best carriages 
appeared Lady Lochinvar’s barouche, deco- 
rated with white camellias and carmine car- 
nations. She had carefully eschewed that 
favorite mixture of camellias and Parma vio- 
lets which has always a half-mourning or 
funereal air. Malcolm Stuart and Miss Ran- 
some sat side by side on the front seat with 
a great basket of carnations on their knees, 
with which they pelted their acquaintance, 
while Lady Lochinvar, in brown velvet and 
ostrich plumage, reposed at her ease in the 
back of the spacious carriage, and enjoyed 
the fun without any active participation. 

It was Pamela’s flrst experience in flower 
fights, and to her the scene seemed enchant- 
ing. The afternoon was peerless. She wore 
a white gown, as if it had been midsummer, 
and white gowns were the rule in most of 
the carriages. The sea was turquoise deep- 
ening to supphire. The white and pink 
walls, the green shutters, and orange-trees, 
cactus, and palm, made up a picture of a city 


162 


THE FATAL THREE. 


in fairy-land, taken as a background for a 
triple procession of carriages, all smothered 
with Parma violets, Dijon roses, camellias, 
and narcissi, with here and there some pict- 
uresque arrangement of oranges and lemons. 

The carriages moved at a footpace ; the 
pavements were crowded with smart people, 
who joined in the contest. Pamela’s lap was 
full of bouquets, which fell from her in show- 
ers as she stood up every now and then to 
fling a handful of carnations into a passing 
carriage. 

Presently, while she was standing thus, 
flushed and sparkling, she saw a face on the 
foot-path by the sea, and paled suddenly at 
the sight. 

It was Cesare Castellani, sauntering slowly 
along, in a short coat of light-colored cloth, 
and a felt hat of exactly the same delicate 
shade. He came to the carriage door. There 
was a block at the moment, and he had time 
to talk to the occupants. 

“How do you do. Lady Lgchinvar? You 
have not forgotten me, I hope — Cesare Cas- 
tellani— though it is such ages since we met.” 

He only lifted his hat to Lady Lochinvar, 
waiting for her recognition, but he held out 
his hand to Pamela. 

“How do you like Nice, Miss Ransome 
— as well as Pallanza, I hope?” 

“Ever so much better than Pallanza.” 
There was a time when that coat and hat, 
the soupgon of dark-blue velvet waistcoat just 
showing underneath the pale-buff collar, the 
loose China silk handkerchief carelessly fast- 
ened with a priceless intaglio, the gardenia, 
and pearl-gray gloves would have ensnared 
Pamela’s fancy; but that time was past. She 
thought that Cesare’s costume looked effemi- 
nate and underbred beside the stern simplic- 
ity of Mr. Stuart’s heather-mixture complet. 
The scales had fallen from her eyes, and she 
recognized the bad taste and the vanity in- 
volved in that studied carelessness, that ar- 
tistic coloring. 

She remembered what Mildred had said of 
Mr. Castellani, and she was deliberately cold. 
Lady Lochinvar was gracious, knowing noth- 
ing to the Italian’s discredit. 

“I remember you perfectly,” she said, 
shaking hands. “You have changed very 
little in all these years. Be sure you come 
and see me. I am at home at flve almost 
every afternoon.” 


The carriage moved on, and Pamela sat 
in an idle reverie for the next ten minutes, 
although the basket of carnations was only 
half empty. 

She was thinking how strange it was that 
her heart beat no faster. Could it be that 
she was cured — and so soon? It was even 
worse than a cure; it was a positive revul- 
sion of feeling. She was vexed with herself 
for ever liaving exalted that over-dressed 
foreigner into a hero. She felt she had been 
un-English, unwomanly, even, in her exag- 
gerated admiration of an exotic. And then 
she glanced at Malcolm Stuart, and averted 
her eyes with a conscious blush on seeing 
him earnestly observant of her. 

He was plain, certainly. Ills features had 
been moulded roughly, but they were not 
bad features. The lines were rather good, 
in fact, and it was a fine, manly coun- 
tenance. He was fair and slightly freckled, 
as became a Scotchman ; his eyes were clear 
and blue, but could be compared with nei- 
ther sapphires nor violets, and his eyelashes 
were lighter than any cultivated young lady 
could approve. The general tone of his hair 
and complexion was ginger ; and ginger, 
taken in connection with masculine beauty, 
is not all one would wish. But then ginger 
is almost the pervading note in the house- 
hold brigade, and it is a hue which harmo- 
nizes agreeably with flashing helmets and 
shell jackets. No doubt Mr. Stuart had 
looked very nice in his uniform. He had 
certainly appeared to advantage in a High- 
land costume at the fancy-ball the other 
night ; some people pronounced him the 
finest-looking man in the room. 

And again, good looks are of little impor- 
tance in a man. A plainish man, possessed 
of all the manly accomplishments — a crack 
shot and a crack rider — can always appear 
to advantage in English society. Pamela 
was beginning to think more kindly of sport- 
ing-men, and even of Sir Henry Mountford. 

“I’m sure Mr. Stuart would get on with 
him,” she thought, dimly foreseeing a day 
when Sir Henry and her new acquaintance 
would be brought together somehow. 

Cesare Castellani took immediate advantage 
of Lady Lochinvar’s invitation. He pre- 
sented himself at the Palais Montano on the 
following afternoon, and he found Pamela 
1 established there, as if she belonged to the 


THE FATAL THREE. 


house. It was she who poured out the tea 
and dispensed those airy little hot cakes 
which were a kind of idealized galette, 
served in the daintiest of embroidered doi- 
lys, resplendent with Lady Lochinvar’s ci- 
pher and coronet. 

Mr. and Mrs. Murray were there, and Mal- 
colm Stuart, the chief charm of whose soci- 
ety seemed to consist in his exhibition of an 
accomplished Dandie Dinmont, which usurp- 
ed the conversation, and which Castellani 
would have liked to innoculate with the 
most virulent form of rabies. Pamela squat- 
ted on a little stool at the creature’s feet, 
and assisted in showing him off. She had 
acquired a power over him which indicated 
an acquaintance of some standing. 

“ What fools girls are,” thought Castellani. 

His conquests among women of maturer 
years had been built upon rock as compared 
with the shifting quicksand of a girl’s fancy. 
He began to think the genus girl beneath 
contempt. 

“He has but one fault,” said Pamela, 
when the terrier had gone through various 
clumsy evolutions, in which the bandyness 
of his legs and the length of his body had 
been shown off to the uttermost. “ He can- 
not endure Box, and Box detests him. They 
never meet without trying to murder each 
other, and I’m very much afraid,” bending 
down to kiss the broad hairy head, “that 
Dandy is the stronger.” 

“Of course he is. Box is splendid for 
muscle, but weight must tell in the long- 
run,” replied Mr. Stuart. 

“My grandmother had a Dandy whose 
father belonged to Sir Walter Scott,” began 
Mrs. Murray; “he was just a pair-r-r-fect 
dog, and my mamma—” 

Castellani fled from this inanity. He went 
to the other end of the room, where Lady 
Lochinvar was listening listlessly to Mr. 
Murray, laid himself out to amuse her lady- 
ship for the next ten minutes, and then de- 
parted without so much as a look at Pamela. 

“ The spell is broken,” he said to himself, 
as he drove away. “ The girl is next door 
to an idiot. No doubt she will marry that 
sandy Scotchman. Lady Lochinvar means 
it, and a silly-pated miss like that can be led 
with a thread of floss-silk. Moi, je m'enfiche. ” 

About a week after Mr. Castellani’s reap- 
pearance Mildred Greswold received a letter \ 


163 

from Brighton which made a sudden change 
in her plans. 

It was from Mr. Maltravers, the incumbent 
of St. Edmund’s: 

“ St. Edmund’s Vicarage. 

“ Dear Mrs. Greswold, — After our thor- 
oughly confidential conversations last au- 
tumn I feel justified in addressing you upon 
a subject which I know is very near to your 
heart, namely, the health and welfare, spirit- 
ual as well as bodily, of your dear aunt, and 
my most valued parishioner. Miss Fausset. 
The condition of that dear lady has given me 
considerable uneasiness during the last few 
months. She has refused to take her hand 
from the plough ; she labors as faithfully as 
ever in the Lord’s vineyard; but I see with 
deepest regret that she is no longer the wom- 
an she was, even a year ago. The decay has 
been sudden, and it has been rapid. Her 
strength begins to fail her, though she will 
hardly admit as much, even to her medical 
attendant; and her spirits are less equable 
than of old. She has intervals of extreme 
depression, against which the efforts of friend- 
ship, the power of spiritual consolation, are 
unavailing. 

“I feel it my duty to inform you, as one 
who has a right to be interested in the dis- 
posal of Miss Fausset’s wealth, that my bene- 
factress has consummated the generosity of 
past years by a munificent gift. She has en- 
dowed her beloved church of St. Edmund 
with an income, which, taken in conjunction 
with the pew-rents, an institution which I 
hope hereafter to abolish, raises the priest of 
the temple from penury to comfort, and af- 
fords him the means of helping the poor of 
his parish with his alms as well as with his 
prayers and ministrations. This noble gift 
closes the long account of beneficence be- 
twixt your dear aunt and St. Edmund’s. I 
have nothing further to expect from her for 
my church or for myself. It is fully under- 
stood between us that this gift is final. You 
will understand, therefore, that I am thor- 
oughly disinterested in my anxiety for this 
precious life. 

“You, dear Mrs. Greswold, are your aunt’s 
only near relative, and it is but right you 
should be the companion and comforter of 
her declining days. That the shadow of the 
grave is upon her I can but fear, although, 
medical science sees but slight cause for 


164 


THE FATAL THREE. 


alarm. A year ago she was a vigorous wom- 
an, spare of habit, certainly, but with a hard- 
ness of bearing and manner which promised 
a long life. To-day she is a broken woman, 
nervous, fitful, and, I fear, unhappy, though 
I can conceive no cause for sadness in the 
closing years of such a noble life as hers has 
been— unselfish, devoted to good works and 
exalted thoughts. If you can find it com- 
patible with your other ties to come to Brigh- 
ton, I would strongly recommend you to 
come without loss of time, and I believe that 
the change which you will yourself perceive 
in my valued friend will fully justify the 
course I take in thus addressing you. 

“lam ever, dear Mrs. Greswold, 

“Your friend and servant, 

“ Samuel Maltravers.” 

Mildred gave immediate orders to courier 
and maid; her trunks were to be packed that 
afternoon, a coupe was to be taken in the 
Rapide for the following day, and they were 
to go straight through to Paris. But when she 
announced this fact to Pamela the damsel’s 
countenance expressed the utmost despond- 
ency. 

“ Upon my word, aunt, you have a genius 
for taking one away from a place just when 


one is beginning to be happy,” she exclaimed, 
in irrepressible vexation. 

She apologized directly after upon hearing 
of Miss Fausset’s illness. 

“I am a horrid, ill-tempered creature,” 
she said; “but I really am beginning to 
adore Nice. It is a place that grows upon 
one.” 

“What if I were to leave you for two or 
three weeks with Lady Lochinvar? She told 
me the other day that she would like very 
much to have you to stay with her. You 
might stay till she leaves Nice, which will be 
in about three weeks’ time, and you could 
travel with her to Paris. You could go from 
Paris to Brighton very comfortably, with Pe- 
terson to take care of you. Perhaps you 
would not mind leaving Nice when Lady 
Lochinvar goes?” 

Pamela sparkled and blushed at the sug- 
gestion. 

“ I should like it very much, if Lady Loch- 
invar is in earnest in asking to have me.” 

“I am sure she is in earnest. There is 
only one stipulation I must make, Pamela. 
You must promise me not to renew your in- 
timacy with Mr. Castellani.” 

“With all my heart, aunt. My eyes have 
been opened. He dresses odiously.” 


CHAPTER III. 

AS THE SANDS RUN DOWN. 


Mildred was in Brighton upon the third 
day after she left Nice. She had sent no in- 
timation of her coming to her aunt, lest her 
visit should be forbidden. A nervous invalid 
is apt to have fancies, and to resent anything 
that looks like being taken care of. She ar- 
rived, therefore, unannounced, left her lug- 
gage at the station, and drove straight to 
Lewes Crescent, where the butler received 
her with every appearance of surprise. 

It was late in the afternoon, and Miss Faus- 
set vms sitting in her accustomed chair in 
the back drawing-room, near the fire, and 
with her book-table on her right hand. The 
balmy spring-time which Mildred had left at 
Nice was unknown in Brighton, where the 
-season had been exceptionally cold, and where 


a jovial north-easter was holding its revels all 
over Kemp Town, and enlivening the sea, 
where Neptune’s white horses were careering 
gayly over the gray expanse. A pleasant, 
bracing day for robust health and animal 
spirits; but not altogether the kind of atmos- 
phere to suit an elderly spinster suffering 
from nervous depression. 

Miss Fausset started up, flushed with sur- 
prise, at Mildred’s entrance. Her niece had 
kept her acquainted with her movements, 
but had told her nothing of the drama of her 
existence since she left Brighton. 

“ My dear child, I am very glad to see you 
back,” she said, gently. “You are come to 
stay with me for a little while, I hope, be- 
fore — ” 


165 


THE FATAL THREE. 


She hesitated, and looked at Mildred ear- 
nestly. 

“Are you reconciled to your husband?” 
she asked, abruptly. 

“Reconciled?” echoed Mildred, “we have 
never quarrelled. He is as dear to me to-day 
as he was the day I married him — dearer for 
all the years we spent together. But we are 
parted forever. You know that it must be 
so, and you know why.” 

“I hoped that time would have taught you 
common-sense.” 

“Time has only confirmed my resolution. 
Do not let us argue the point, aunt. I know 
that you mean kindly ; but I know that you 
are false to your own principles— to all the 
teaching of your life — when you argue on 
the side of wrong.” 

Miss Fausset turned her head aside impa- 
tiently. She had sunk back into her chair 
after greeting Mildred, and her niece per 
ceived that she, who used to sit erect as a 
dart, in the most uncompromising attitude, 
was now propped up with cushions, against 
which her wasted figure leaned languidly. 

“How have you got through the winter, 
aunt?” Mildred asked, presently. 

“Not very well. It has tried me more 
than any other winter I can remember. . It 
has been a long weary winter. I have been 
obliged to give up the greater part of my dis- 
trict work. I held on as long as ever I could, 
till my strength failed me. And now 1‘have 
to trust the work to others. I have my lieu- 
tenants — Clara and Emily Newton — who 
work for me. You remember them, perhaps; 
earnest, good girls. They keep me en rap-" 
port with my poor people — but it is not like 
personal intercourse. I begin to feel what 
it is to be useless — to cumber the ground.” 

“My dear aunt, how can you talk so? 
Your life has been so full of usefulness that 
you may well afford to take rest, now that 
your health is not quite so good as it has 
been. Even in your drawing-room here you 
are doing good. It is only right that young 
people should carry out your instructions 
and work for you. I have heard, too, of 
your munificent gift to St. Edmund’s.” 

“ It is nothing, my dear; when all is count- 
ed, it is nothing. I have tried to lead a 
righteous life. I have tried to do good— but 
now, sitting alone by this fire day after day, 
night after night, it all seems vain and empty. 


There is no comfort in the thought of it all, 
Mildred. I have had the praise of men, but 
never the approval of my own conscience.” 

There was a silence of some moments, Mil- 
dred feeling at a loss for any fitting words of 
comfort or cheerfulness. 

“Then you are not going back to your 
husband?” her aunt asked, abruptly, as if in 
forgetfulness of all that had been said, and 
then, suddenly recollecting herself; “You 
have made up your mind, you say. Well, in 
that case you can stay with me — make this 
your home. You may take up my work, 
perhaps, by-and-by.” 

“Yes, aunt, I hope I may be able to do so. 
My life has been idle and useless since my 
great sorrow. I want to learn to be of more 
j use in the world — and you can teach me, if 
! you will.” 

“I will, Mildred. I want you to be hap- 
py. I have made my will. You will inherit 
all I have to leave, after some small legacies 
to my servants, and five hundred pounds to 
Cesare Castellani.” 

“My dear aunt, I don’t want — ” 

“No, you are rich enough already, I know; 
but I should like you to have still larger 
means, to profit by my death. You will use 
your wealth for the good of others — as I have 
tried — feebly tried to use mine. You will be 
rich enough to found a sisterhood, if you 
like, the Sisters of St. Edmund. I have done 
all I mean to do for the church. Mr. Mal- 
travers knows that.” 

“Dear aunt, why should we talk of these 
things? You have many years of life before 
you, I hope.” 

“No, Mildred, the end is not far off. I 
feel worn out and broken. I am a doomed 
woman.” 

“But you have had no serious illness since 
I was here?” 

“No, no, nothing specific; only languor 
and shattered nerves, loss of appetite, sleep- 
lessness— the sure indications of decay. My 
doctor can find no name for my malady. 
He tries one remedy after another, until I 
weary of his experiments. I am glad you 
have come to me, Mildred — but I should be 
gladder if you were going back to your hus- 
band.” 

“Oh, aunt, why do you say things which 
you know must torture me?” 

“Because I am worried by your folly. 


166 


THE FATAL THREE. 


Well, I will say no more. You will stay 
with me and comfort me, if you can. What 
have you done with Pamela?” 

Mildred told her aunt about Lady Lochin- 
var’s invitation. 

“ Ah, she is with Lady Lochiuvar — a very 
frivolous person, I suppose. Your husband’s 
niece is a well-meaning, silly girl; sure to get 
into mischief of some kind. Is she still in 
love with Cesare Castellani?” 

“ I think not. I hope not. I believe she 
is cured of that folly.” 

“ You call it a folly. Well, perhaps you 
are right. It may be foolishness for a girl to 
follow the blind instinct of her heart.” 

“For an impulsive girl like Pamela.” 

“Yes, no doubt she is impulsive, generous, 
and uncalculating, a girl hardly to be trusted 
with her own fate,” said Miss Fausset with 
a sigh, and then she lapsed into silence. 

Mr. Maltravers had not exaggerated the 
change in her. It was only too painfully evi- 
dent. Her whole manner and bearing had 
altered since Mildred had seen her last. 
Physically and mentally her whole nature 
seemed to have relaxed and broken down. 
It was as if the springs that sustained the 
human machine had snapped. The whole 
mechanism was out of gear. She who had 
been so firm of speech and meaning, who had 
been wont to express herself with a cold and 
cutting decisiveness, was now feeble and ir- 
resolute, repeating herself, harping upon the 
same old string, obviously forgetful of that 
which had gone before. 

Mildred thought that she would be only 
doing her duty as Miss Fausset’s nearest 
relative in taking up her abode in the great 
dull house and trying to soothe the tedium 
of decay. She could do very little, perhaps, 
but the fact of near kindred would be in it- 
self a solace; and for her own part she would 
have the sense of duty done. 

“I will stay with you as long as you will 
have me,” she said, gently. “Albrecht is 
below. May I send to the station for my 
baggage ?” 

“Of course, and your rooms shall be got 
ready immediately. The house will be yours 
before very long, perhaps. It would be 
strange if you could not make it your home !” 

She touched a spring on her book-table, 
which communicated with the electric bell, 
and Franz appeared promptly. 


“Tell them to get Mrs. Creswold’s old 
rooms ready at once, and send Albrecht to the 
station for the luggage,” ordered Miss Faus- 
set, with something of her old decisiveness. 
“Louisa is with you, I suppose?” she added 
to her niece. 

“ Louisa is at the station looking after my 
things. Albrecht leaves me to-day. He has 
been a good servant, and I think he has had 
an easy place. I have not been an eager 
traveller.” 

“ No, you seem to have taken life at a slow 
pace. What took you to Nice? It is not a 
place I should have chosen if I wanted 
quiet.” 

Mildred hesitated for some moments be- 
fore she replied to this question. 

“You know one part of my sorrow, aunt. 
I think I might trust you with the whole of 
that sad story. I went to Nice because it 
was the place where my husband lived with 
his first wife — where my unhappy sister 
died.” 

“She died at Nice,” repeated Miss Faus- 
set, with an abstracted air, as if her power of 
attention, which had revived just now, were 
beginning to flag. 

“She died there — under the saddest cir- 
cumstances. I am heart-broken when I 
think of her and that sad fate. My own 
dear Fay— my generous, loving Fay — how 
hard that your loving heart should be an in- 
strunient of self-torture! She was jealous of 
her husband — causelessly, unreasonably jeal- 
ous, and she killed herself in a paroxysm of 
despair.” 

The awfulness of this fact roused Miss Faus- 
set from her apathy. She started up from 
among her cushions, staring at Mildred in 
mute horror, and her wasted hands trembled 
as they grasped the arm of her chair. 

“Surely, surely that can’t be true,” she 
faltered. “It is too dreadful. People tell 
such lies — an accident, perhaps, exaggerated 
into a suicide — an overdose of an opiate.” 

“No, no, it was nothing like that. There 
is no doubt. I heard it from those who 
knew. She flung herself over the edge of 
the cliff —she was walking with her husband 
— my husband — George Greswold — then 
George Ransome— they were walking togeth- 
er — they quarrelled — he said something that 
stung her to the quick, and she threw herself 
over the cliff. It was the wild impulse of a 


THE FATAL THREE. 


167 


moment, for which an all-merciful God will 
not hold her accountable. She was in very 
delicate health, nervous, hysterical, and she 
fancied herself unloved, betrayed perhaps. 
Ah, aunt, think how hardly she had been 
used, cast off, disowned, sent out alone into 
the world by those who should have loved 
and protected her. Poor, poor Fay! My 
mother sent her away from The Hook where 
she was so happy. My mother’s jealousy 
drove her out — a young girl so friendless, so 
lonely, so much in need of love. It was my 
mother’s doings— but my father ought not to 
have allowed it. If she was weak, he was 
strong, and Fay was his daughter. It was 
his duty to protect her against all the world. 
You know how I loved my father, you know 
that I reverence his memory, but I feel that 
he played a coward’s part when he sent Fay 
out of his house to please my mother.” 

She was carried away by her passionate 
regret for that ill-used girl whose image had 
never lost its hold upon her heart. 

“Not a word against your father, Mildred. 
He was a good man. He never failed in af- 
fection or in duty. He acted for the best 
according to his lights in relation to that un- 
happy girl — unhappy — ill-used — yes, yes, yes. 
He did his best, Mildred. He must not be 
blamed. But it is dreadful to think that she 
killed herself.” 

“Had you heard nothing of her fate, aunt? 
My father must have been told, surely; 
there must have been some means of com- 
munication. He must have kept himself 
informed about her fate, although she was 
banished, given over to the care of strangers. 
If he had owned a dog which other people 
took care of for him he would have been 
told when the dog died.” 

Miss Fausset felt the unspeakable bitter- 
ness of this comparison. 

“You must not speak like that of your 
father, Mildred. Y ou ought to know that he 
was a good man. Yes, he knew, of course, 
when that poor girl died ; but it was not his 
business to tell other people. I only heard — 
incidentally — that she had married, and that 
she died within a year of her marriage. I 
heard no more. It was the end of a sad 
story.” 

Again there was an interval of silence. It 
was six o’clock, the sun was going down 
over the sea beyond the west pier, and the 


lawn, and the fashionable garden where the 
gay world congregates, while this eastern end 
of the long white sea-front was lapsing into 
grayness, through which a star shone dimly 
here and there. It looked a cold, dull world 
after the pink hotel and the green shutters, 
the dusty palms, and the bright blue sea of 
the Promenade des Anglais; but Mildred was 
glad to be in England, glad to be so much 
nearer him whose life-companion she could 
never be again. 

Franz brought her some tea presently, and 
informed her that her rooms were ready, and 
that Louisa had arrived with the luggage. 
Albrecht had left his humble duty for his 
honored mistress, and was gone. 

“When your father died, you looked 
through his papers and letters, no doubt?” 
said Miss Fausset presently, after a pause in 
the conversation. 

“Yes, aunt, I looked through my dear 
father’s letters in the library in Parchment 
Street, and arranged everything with our old 
family solicitor,” answered Mildred, surprised 
at a question which seemed to have no bear- 
ing upon anything that had gone before. 

“And you found no documents relating to 
— that unhappy girl?” 

“ Not a line — not a word. But I had not 
expected to find anything. The history of 
her birth was the one dark secret of my fa- 
ther’s life — he would naturally leave no trace 
of the story.” 

‘ ‘ Naturally, if he were wiser than most 
people. But I have observed that men of 
business have a passion for preserving docu- 
ments even when they are worthless. People 
keep compromising papers with the idea of 
destroying them on their death-beds, or when 
they feel the end is near; and then death 
comes without warning, and the papers re- 
main. Your father’s end was somewhat sud- 
den.” 

‘ ‘ Sadly sudden. When he left us that au- 
tumn he was in excellent health. The shoot- 
ing had been better than usual that year, and 
I think he had enjoyed it as much as the 
youngest of our party. And then he went 
back to London and the London fogs — caught 
cold — neglected himself — and we were sum- 
moned to Parchment Street to find him dying 
of inflammation of the lungs. It was terri- 
ble 1 Such a brief fare well— such an irrepar- 
able loss.” 


168 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“I was not sent for,” said Miss Fausset, 
severely. “And yet I loved your father 
dearly.” 

“ It was wrong, aunt, but we hoped against 
hope almost to the last. It was only within 
a few hours of the end that we knew 
the case was hopeless, and to summon you 
would have been to give him the idea that 
he was dying. George and I pretended that 
our going to him was accidental, we were so 
fearful of alarming him.” 

“Well, I dare say you acted for the best; 
but it was a heavy blow for me to be told 
that he was gone— my only brother — almost 
my only friend.” 

“Pray don’t say that, aunt. I hope you 
know that I love you?” 

“ My dear, you love me because I am your 
father’s sister. You consider it your duty to 
love me. My brother loved me for my own 
sake, loved me through thick and thin. He 
was a noble-hearted man.” 

Miss Fausset and her niece dined together 
tke-d-tete, and spent the evening quietly on 
each side of the hearth, with their books and 
work, the kind of work which encourages 
pensive brooding, as the needle travels slow- 
ly over the fabric. 

“ I wonder you have no pets, aunt — no fa- 
vorite dog.” 

“ I have never cared for that kind of affec- 
tion, Mildred. I am of too hard a nature, 
perhaps. My heart does not open itself to 
dogs and cats, and parrots are my abomina- 
tion. I am not like the typical spinster. My 
only solace in the long weary years has been 
in going among people who are more unhap- 
py than myself. I have put myself face to 
face with sordid miseries, with heavy life- 
long burdens, and I have asked myself what 
is your trouble compared with these?” 

“ Dear aunt, it seems to me that your life 
must have been particularly free from trou- 
ble and care. ” 

“Perhaps, in its outward aspect. I am 
rich, and I have been looked up to. But do 
you think those long years of loneliness — the 
aimless, monotonous pilgrimage through life 
has not been a burden ? Do you think I have 
not — sometimes, at any rate — envied other 
women their children and their husbands, 
the atmosphere of domestic love — even with 
all its cares and sorrows? Do you suppose 
that I could live for a quarter of a century 


as I have lived and not feel my isolation? 
I have made people care for me through their 
self-interest. I have made people honor me 
because I have the means of helping them. 
But who is there who cares for me, Madalena 
Fausset?” 

“You cannot have done so much for oth- 
ers without being sincerely loved in return.” 

“ With a kind of love, perhaps — a love that 
has been bought.” 

“ Why did you never marry, aunt?” 

“Because I was an heiress and a good 
match, and distrusted every man who wanted 
to marry me. I made a vow to myself, be- 
fore my twentieth birthday, that I would 
never listen to words of love or give encour- 
agenient to a lover; and I most scrupulously 
kept that vow. I was called a handsome 
woman in those days; but I was not an at- 
tractive woman at any time. Nature had 
made me of too hard a clay.” 

“It wa^ a pity that you should keep love 
at arm’s-length.” 

“Far better than to have been fooled by 
shams, as I might have been. Don’t say any 
more about it, Mildred. I made my vow, and 
I kept it.” 

Mildred resigned herself quietly to the idea 
of the dull slow life in Lewes Crescent. This 
duty of solacing her aunt’s declining days 
was the only duty that remained to her, ex- 
cept that wider duty of caring for the help- 
less and the wretched. And she told herself 
that there would be no better school in which 
to learn how to help others than the house of 
Miss Fausset, who had given so much of her 
life to the poor. 

She had been told to consider her aunt’s 
house as her own, and that she was at liberty 
to receive Pamela there as much and as often 
as she liked. She did not think that Pamela 
would be long without a settled home. Mr. 
Stuart’s admiration and Lady Lochinvar’s 
wishes had been obvious; and Mildred daily 
expected a gushing letter from the fickle 
damsel, announcing her engagement to the 
Scotchman. 

At four o’clock on the day after Mildred’s 
arrival Miss Fausset’s friends began to drop 
in for afternoon tea and talk, and Mildred 
was surprised to see how her aunt rallied in 
that long-familiar society. It seemed as if 
the praises and flatteries of these people acted 
upon her like strong wine. The languid at- 


169 


,THE FATAL THREE. 


titude, tlie weary expression of the pale 
drawn face were put aside. She sat erect 
again, her eyes brightened, her ear was alert 
to follow three or four conversations at a 
time; nothing escaped her. Mildred began 
to think that she had lived upon the praises 
of men rather than upon the approval of con- 
science — that these assiduities and flatteries 
of a very commonplace circle were essential 
to her happiness. 

Mr. Maltravers came after the vesper serv- 
ice, full of life and conversation, vigorous, 
self-satisfled, with an air of Papal dominion 
and Papal infallibility, so implicitly believed 
in by his flock that he had learned to believe 
as implicitly in himself. The flock was 
chiefly feminine, and worshipped without 
limit or reservation. There were husbands 
and sons, brothers and nephews, who went 
to church with their womenkind on Sunday; 
but these were for the most part without en- 
thusiasm for Mr. Maltravers. Their idea of 
public worship scarcely went beyond consid- 
ering Sunday morning service a respectable 
institution not to be dispensed with lightly. 

Mr. Maltravers welcomed Mildred with 
touching friendliness. 

“I knew you would not fail your aunt in 
the hour of need,” he said; “and now I hope 
you are going to stay with her, and to take 
up her work when she lays it down, so that 
the golden thread of charity and womanly 
love may be unbroken.” 

“I hope I may be able to take up her 
work. I shall stay with her as long as she 
needs me.” 

“That is well. You found her sadly 
changed, did you not?” 

“Yes, she is much changed. Yet how 
bright she looks this afternoon ! what interest 
she takes in the conversation!” 

“ The flash of the falchion in the worn-out 
scabbard,” said Mr. Maltravers. 

A layman might have said sword, but Mr. 
Maltravers preferred falchion, as a more pict- 
uresque word. Half the success of his preach- 
ing had lain in the choice of picturesque 
words. There were sceptics among his mas- 
culine congregation who said there were no 
ideas in his sermons, only fine words, roman- 
tic similes, a perpetual recurrence of fount- 
ains and groves, sunset splendors and roseate 
dawns, golden gates and starry canopies, seas 
of glass, harps of gold. But if his female 


worshippers felt better and holier after listen- 
ing to him, what could one ask more?— and 
they all declared that it was so. They came 
out of church spiritualized, overflowing with 
Christian love, and gave their pence eager- 
ly to the crossing - sweepers on their way 
home. 

The dropping in and the tea-drinking went 
on for nearly two hours. Mr. Maltravers took 
four cups of tea and consumed a good deal of 
bread and butter, abstaining from the choco- 
late biscuits and the pound-cake, which the 
ladies of the party affected — abstaining on 
principle, as saints and hermits of old ab- 
stained from high living. He allowed him- 
self to enjoy the delicate aroma of the tea, 
and the daintily cut bread and butter. He 
was a bachelor, and lived poorly upon badly 
cooked food at his vicarage. His only per- 
sonal indulgence was in the accumulation of 
a theological library, in which all the books 
were of a High- Church caste. 

When the visitors were all gone Miss Faus- 
set sank back into her chair, white and weary- 
looking, and Mildred left her to take a little 
nap, while she went up to her own room — 
half boudoir, half dressing-room — a spacious 
apartment, with a fine sea-view. Here she sat 
in a reverie, and watched the fading sky, and 
the slow dim stars creeping out one by one. 

Was she really to take up her aunt’s work 
— to live in a luxurious home, a lonely, love- 
less woman, and to go out in a methodical, 
almost mechanical, way, so many times a 
week, to visit among the poor? Would such 
a life as that satisfy her in all the long slow 
years? 

The time would come, perhaps, when she 
would find peace in such a life; when her 
heart would know no grief except the grief 
of others ; when she would have cast off the 
fetters of selfish cares and selfish yearnings, 
and would stand alone, as saints and martyrs 
and holy women of old have stood, alone with 
God and his poor. There were women, she 
knew, even in these degenerate days, who so 
lived and so worked, seeking no guerdon but 
the knowledge of good done in this world and 
the hope of the crown immortal. Her day of 
sacrifice had not yet come. She had not been 
able to dissever her soul from the hopes and 
sorrows of earth; she had not been able to 
forget the husband she had forsaken, even for 
a single hour. When she knelt down to pray 


170 


THE FATAL THREE. 


at niglit, when she awoke in the morning, 
her thoughts were with him. How does he 
bear his solitude? Has he learned to forget 
me and to be happy ? These questions were 
ever present to her mind. 

And now at Brighton, knowing herself so 
near him, her heart yearned more than ever 
for the sight of the familiar face, for the sound 
of the beloved voice. She pored over the 
time-table, and calculated the length of the 
journey — the time lost at Portsmouth and 
Bishopstoke — every minute until the arrival 
at Romsey, and then the drive to Enderby. 
She pictured the lanes in the early May — the 
hedge -rows bursting into leaf, the banks 
where the primroses were fading, the tender 
young ferns just beginning to uncurl their 
feathery fronds, the spear-points of the harts- 
tongue shooting up amid rank broad docks, 
and the flowers on the leafless blackthorn 
making patches of white among the green. 

How easy it was to reach him — how natu- 
ral it would seem to hasten to him after half 
a year of exile ! and yet she must not. She 
had pledged herself to honor the law — to 
obey the letter and the spirit of that harsh 
law which decreed that her sister’s husband 
could not be hers. 

She knew that he was at Enderby, and she 
had some ground for supposing that he was 
well and even contented. She had seen the 
letters which he had written to his niece. 'He 
had written about the shooting, his horses, 
his dogs, and there had been no word to in- 
dicate that he was out of health, or in low 
spirits. Mildred had pored over those brief 
letters, forgetting to return them to the right- 
ful owner — cherishing them as if they made 
a kind of link between her and the love she 
had renounced. 

How firm the hand was; that fine and in- 
dividual penmanship which she had so ad- 
mired in the past — the hand in which her 
first love-letter had been written! It was but 
little altered in fifteen years. She recalled 
the happy hour when she received that first 
letter from her affianced husband. He had 
gone to London a day or two after their be- 
trothal, eager to make all arrangements for 
their marriage, impatient for settlements and 
legal machinery, which would make their 
union irrevocable — full of plans for immedi- 
ate improvements at Enderby. 

She remembered how she ran out into the 


garden to read that first letter — a long letter, 
though they had been parted less than a day 
when it was written. She had gone to the 
remotest nook in that picturesque river-side 
garden, a rustic bower by the water’s edge, 
an osier arbor over which her own hands 
had trained the Celine Forestiere roses. They 
were in flower on that happy day, clusters of 
pale yellow bloom, breathing perfume round 
her as she sat beneath the blossoming arch 
and devoured her lover’s fond words. Oh, 
how bright life had been then for both of 
them; for her without a cloud! 

He was well; that was something to know; 
but it was not enough. Her heart yearned 
for fuller knowledge of his life than those 
letters gave. Wounded pride might have 
prompted that cheerful tone. He might 
wish her to think him happy and at ease 
without her. He thought that she had used 
him ill. It was natural, perhaps, that he 
should think so, since he could not see 
things as she saw them. He had not her 
deep-rooted convictions. She thought of 
him, and wondered about him till the desire 
for further knowledge grew into an aching 
pain. She must write to some one; she must 
do something to quiet this gnawing anxiety. 
In her trouble she thought of all her friends 
in the neighborhood of Enderby; but there 
was none in whom she could bring herself 
to confide except Mr. Rollinson, the curate. 
She had thought first of writing to the doc- 
tor, but he was something of a gossip, and 
would be likely to prattle to his patients 
about her letter, and her folly in forsaking 
so good a husband. Rollinson she felt she 
might trust. He was a thoughtful young 
man, despite his cheery manners and some 
inclination to facetiousness of a strictly cler- 
ical order. He was one of a large family, 
and had known troubles, and Mildred had 
been especially kind to him and to the sis- 
ters who from time to time had shared his 
apartments at the carpenter’s, and had rev- 
elled in the gayeties of Enderby parish, the 
penny reading at the school-house, the sale of 
work for the benefit of the choir, and occa- 
sional afternoon tea and tennis at the manor. 
These maiden sisters of the curate’s had 
known and admired Lola, and Mr. Rollinson 
had been devoted to her from his first com- 
ing to the parish, when she was a lovely child 
of seven. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


171 


Mildred wrote fully and frankly to the 
curate. “I cannot enter upon the motive 
of our separation,” she wrote, “ except so far 
as to tell you that it is a question of princi- 
ple which has parted us. My husband has 
been blameless in all his domestic relations, 
the best of husbands, the noblest of men. 
Loving him with all my heart, trusting and 
honoring him as much as on my wedding- 
day, I yet felt it my duty to leave him. I 
should not make this explanation to any one 
else at Enderby, but I wish you to know the 
truth. If people ever question you about my 
reasons you can tell them that it is my in- 
tention ultimately to enter an Anglican sis- 
terhood, or it may be to found a sisterhood, 
and to devote my declining years to my suf- 
ing fellow -creatures. This is my fixed in- 
tention, but my vocation is yet weak. My 
heart cleaves to the old home and all that I 
lost in leaving it. 

“And now, my kind friend, I want you to 
tell me how my husband fares in his solitude. 
If he were ill and unhappy he would be too 
generous to complain to me. Tell me how 
he is in health and spirits. Tell me of 
his daily life, his amusements, occupations. 
There is not the smallest detail which will 
not interest me. You see him, I hope, often; 
certainly you are likely to see him oftener 
than any one else in the parish. Tell me all 
you can, arid be assured of my undying grat- 
itude. 

“ Ever sincerely yours, 

“Mildred Greswold.” 

Mr. Rollinson’s reply came by return of 
post: 

“ I am very glad you have written to me, 
my dear Mrs. Greswold. Had I known your 
address I think I should have taken the ini- 
tiative and written to you. Believe me, I 
respect your motive for the act which has, I 
fear, cast a blight upon a good man’s life, 
and I will venture to say no more than that 
the motive should be a very strong one which 
forces you to persevere in a course that has 
wrecked your husband’s happiness and deso- 
lated one of the most delightful and most 
thoroughly Christian homes I had ever the 
privilege of entering. I look back and recall 
what Enderby Manor was, and I think what 
it is now, and I can hardly compare those 


two pictures without tears — ^ tears which I 
cannot deem unmanly, which I am not 
ashamed to shed. 

“You ask me to tell you frankly all I can 
tell about your husband’s mode of life, his 
health and spirits. All I can tell is summed 
up in four words: his heart is broken. In 
my deep concern about his desolate position, 
in my heart-felt regard for him, I have vent- 
ured to force my society upon him some- 
times when I could not doubt it was un- 
welcome. He receives me with all his old 
kindness of manner, but I am sympathetic 
enough to know when a man only endures 
my company, and I know that his feeling is 
at best endurance. But I believe that he 
trusts me, and that he is less upon his guard 
with me than he is with other acquaintances. 
I have seen him put on an appearance of 
cheerfulness with other people. I have heard 
him talk to other people as if life had in no- 
wise lost its interest for him. With me he 
drops the mask. I have seen him brooding 
by his hearth as he broods when he is alone. 
I have heard his involuntary sighs. I have 
seen the image of a shipwrecked existence. 
Indeed, Mrs. Greswold, there is nothing else 
that I can tell you if you would have me 
truthful. You have broken his heart. You 
have sacrificed your love to principle, you 
say. You should be very sure of your prin- 
ciple. You ask me as to his habits and oc- 
cupations. I believe they are about as mo- 
notonous as those of a galley slave. He walks 
a great deal — in all weathers and at all hours 
— but rarely beyond his own land. I don’t 
think he often rides; and he has not hunted 
once during the season. He did a little shoot- 
ing in October and November quite alone. 
He has had no staying visitor within his doors 
since you left him. 

‘ ‘ I have reason to know that he goes to 
the church-yard every evening at dusk, and 
spends some time beside your daughter’s 
grave. I have seen him there several times 
when it was nearly dark, and he had no ap- 
prehension of being observed. You know 
how rarely any one enters our quiet little bur- 
ial-ground, and how complete a solitude it is 
at that twilight hour. I am about the only 
passer-by, and even I do not pass within 
sight of the old yew-tree above your darling’s 
resting-place, unless I go a little out of my 
way between the vestry door and the lich- 


173 


THE FATAL THREE. 


gate. I have often gone out of my way to 
note that lonely figure hy the grave. 

“Be assured, dear Mrs. Greswold, that in 
sending you this gloomy picture of a wid- 
owed life 1 have had no wish to distress you. 
I have exaggerated nothing. I wish you to 
know the truth; and if it lies within your 
power — without going against your con- 
science— to undo that which you have done, 
I entreat you' to do so without delay. There 
may not he much time to be lost. 

“ Believe me, devotedly and gratefully 
“Your friend, 

“Frederick Rollinson.” 

Mildred shed bitter tears over the curate’s 
letter. How different the picture it offered 
from that afforded by George Greswold’s own 
letters, in which he had written cheerily of 
the shooting, the dogs and horses, the changes 
in the seasons, and the events of the outer 
world! That frank, easy tone had been part 
of the armor of pride. He would not abase 
himself by the admission of his misery. He 
had guessed, no doubt, that his wife would 
read those letters, and he would not have 
her know the extent of the ruin she had 
wrought. 

She thought of him in his solitude — pict- 
ured him beside their child’s grave, and the 
longing to look upon him once more, unseen 
by him if it could be so, became too strong 
for her patience to bear. She determined to 
see with her own eyes if he were indeed as 
unhappy as Mr. Rollinson supposed. She, 
who knew him so well, would be better able 
to judge by his manner and bearing — better 
able to divine the inner workings of his heart 
and mind. It had been a habit of her life to 
read his face — to guess his thoughts before 
they found expression in words. He had 
never been able to keep a secret from her, ex- 
cept that one long-hidden story of the past ; 
and even there she had known that there was 
something. She had seen the shadow of that 
abiding remorse. 

“I am going to leave you for two days, 
aunt,” she said, rather abruptly, on the morn- 
ing after she received Mr. Rollinson’s letter. 
“ I want to look at Lola’s grave. I shall go 
from here to Enderby as fast as the train will 
take me; spend an hour in the church-yard; 
go on to Salisbury for the night, and come 
back to you the following afternoon.” 


“You mean that you are going back to 
your husband.” 

‘ ‘ No, no. I may see him, perhaps— by ac- 
cident. I shall not enter the manor-house. 
I am going to the church-yard — nowhere 
else.” 

“You would be wiser if you went straight 
home — remember, years hence, when I am 
dead and gone, that I told you as much. 
You must do as you like— stay at an inn at 
Salisbury, while your own beautiful home is 
empty, or anything else that is foolish and 
wrong-headed. You had better let Franz go 
with you.” 

“Thanks, aunt; I would not take him 
away on any account. I can get on quite 
well by myself.” 

She left Brighton at mid-day; lost a good 
deal of time at the two junctions, and drove 
to within a few hundred yards of Enderby 
Church just as the bright May day was melt- 
ing into evening. There was a path across 
some meadows at the back of the village that 
led to the church -yard. She stopped the fly 
by the meadow gate, and told the man to 
drive round to Mr. Rollinson’s lodgings and 
wait for her there, and then she walked slow- 
ly along the narrow foot-path, between the 
long grass, golden with buttercups in the 
golden evening. 

It was a lovely evening. There was a lit- 
tle wood of oaks and chestnuts on her left 
hand as she approached the church-yard, and 
the shrubberies of Enderby Manor were on 
her right. The trees she knew so well — her 
own trees — the tall mountain -ash and the 
clump of beeches rose above the lower level of 
lilacs and laburnums, acacia and rose-maple. 
There was a nightingale singing in the thick 
foliage yonder — there was always a nightin- 
gale at this season somewhere in the shrub- 
bery. She had lingered many a time with 
her husband to listen to that unmistakable 
melody. 

The dense dark foliage of the church-yard 
made an inky blot among all that vernal 
greenery. Those immemorial yews, which 
knew no change with the changing years, 
spread their broad shadows over the lowly 
graves, and made night in God’s acre while 
it was still daylight in the world outside. 
Mildred went into the church-yard as if into 
the realm of death. The shadows closed 
round her on all sides, and the change from 


THE FATAL THREE. 


light to gloom chilled her as she walked 
slowly towards the place where her child was 
lying. 

Yes; he was there; just as the curate had 
told her. He stood leaning against the long 
horizontal branch of the old yew, looking 
down at the broad white marble cross which 
bore his daughter’s name. He was very pale, 
and his sunken eyes and hollow cheeks told 
of failing health. He stood motionless, in a 
gloomy reverie. His wife watched him from 
a little way off. She stood motionless as 
himself— stood and watched him till the beat- 
ing of her heart sounded so loud in her own 


173 

ears that she thought he too must hear that 
passionate throbbing. 

She had thought when she set out on her 
journey that it would be sufficient for her 
just to see him, and that having seen him she 
would go away and leave him without his 
ever knowing that she had looked upon him. 
But now the time had come, it was not enough. 
The impulse to draw nearer and to speak to 
him was too strong to be denied. She went 
with tottering footsteps to the side of the 
grave, and called him by his name — 

“ George! George!” holding out her hands 
to him piteously. 


CHAPTER IV. 

^‘hOW should I GREET THEE?” 


The marble countenance scarcely changed 
as he looked up at her. He took no notice 
of the out-stretched hands. 

“What brings you here, Mildred?” he 
asked, coldly. 

“I heard that you were ill; I wanted to 
see for myself,” she faltered. 

“ I am not ill, and I have not been ill. 
You were misinformed.” 

“ I was told you were unhappy.” 

“Did you require to be told that? You 
did not expect to hear that I was particular- 
ly happy, I suppose? At my age men have 
forgotten how to forget.” 

“ It would be such a relief to my mind if 
you could find new occupations, new inter- 
ests, as I hope to do by-and-by — a wider ho- 
rizon. You are so clever. You have so many 
gifts, and it is a pity to bury them all here.” 

“My heart is buried here,” he answered, 
looking down at the grave. 

“Your heart, yes ; but you might find 
work for your mind— a noble career before 
you— in politics, in philanthropy.” 

“ I am not ambitious, and I am too old to 
adapt myself to a new life. I prefer to live 
as I am living. Enderby is my hermitage. 
It suits me well enough.” 

There was a silence after this— -a silence of 
despair. Mildred knelt on the dewy grass, 
and bent herself over the marble cross, and 
kissed the cold atone. She went no nearer | 


than that marble to the child she loved. Her 
lips lingered there. Her heart ached with a 
dull pain, and she felt the utter hopelessness 
of her life more keenly than she had felt it 
yet. If she could but die there, at his feet, 
and make an end. 

She rose after some minutes. Her hus- 
band’s attitude was unchanged ; but he looked 
at her now, for the first time, with a direct 
and earnest gaze. 

“ What took you to Nice?” he asked. 

“ I wanted to know-all about my unhap- 
py sister. ” 

“And you are satisfied— you know all — 
and you think as some of my neighbors 
thought of me. You believe that I killed my 
wife.” 

“George, can you think so meanly of me 
— your wife of fourteen years?” 

“You spare me, then, so far — in spite of 
circumstantial evidence. You do not think 
of me as a murderer?” 

“I have never for a moment doubted your 
goodness to that unhappy girl,” she answered, 
with a stifled sob. “lam sorry for her with 
all my heart; but I cannot blame you.” 

“There you are wrong. I was to blame. 
You know that I do not easily lose my tem- 
per— to a woman, least of all; but that day I 
lost control over myself — lost patience with 
her just when she was in greatest need of my 
forbearance. She .was nervous and hysteri- 


174 


THE FATAL THREE. 


cal. I forgot her weakness. I spoke to her 
cruelly — stung out of all consideration by her 
causeless jealousies— so persistent, so irritat- 
ing — like the continual dropping of water. 
How I have suffered for that moment of an- 
ger God alone can know. If remorse can he 
expiation, I have expiated that unpremedi- 
tated sin !” 

“ Yes, yes, I know how you have suffered. 
Your dreams have told me.” 

“Ah, those dreams! You can never im- 
agine the agony of them. To fancy her walk- 
ing by my side, bright and happy, as she so 
seldom was upon this earth, and to tell my- 
self that I had never been unkind to her, that 
her suicide was a dream and a delusion — and 
then to feel the dull cold reality creep back 
into my brain and to know that I was guilty 
of her death. Yes, I have held myself guilty. 
I have never paltered with my conscience. 
Had I been patient to the end, she might have 
lived to be the happy mother of my child. 
Her whole life might have been changed. I 
never loved her, Mildred. Fate and her own 
impulsive nature flung her into my arms: 
but I had accepted the charge, I had made 
myself responsible to God and my own con- 
science for her well-being.” 

Mildred’s only answer was a sob. She 
stretched out her hand, and laid it falteringly 
upon the hand that hung loose across the 
branch of the yew, as if in token of trustful- 
ness. 

“Did you find out anything more in your 
retrospective gropings — at Nice?” he asked, 
with a touch of bitterness. 

She was silent. 

“Did you hear that I was out of my mind 
after my wife’s death?” 

“Yes.” 

“Did that shock you? Did it horrify you 
to know you had lived fourteen years with a 
ci-devant lunatic?” 

“George, how can you say such things? 
I could perfectly understand how your mind 
was affected by that dreadful event — how 
the strongest brain might be unhinged by 
such a sorrow. I can S3^mpathize with you, 
and understand you in the past, as I can in 
the present. How can you forget that I am 
your wife, a part of yourself, able to read all 
your thoughts?” 

“I cannot forget that you have been my 
wife, but your sympathy and your affection 


seem very far off now — as remote almost as 
that tragedy which darkened my youth. It 
is all past and done with— the sorrow and 
pain, the hope and gladness. I have done 
with everything — except my regret for my 
child.” 

“ Can you believe that I feel the parting 
less than you, George?” she asked, piteously. 

“ I don’t know. The parting is your work. 
You have the satisfaction of self-sacrifice — 
the pride which women who go to church 
twice a day have in renouncing earthly hap- 
piness. They school themselves first in trifles 
— giving up this and that — theatres, fiction, 
cheerful societ}’’, and then their ambition wid- 
ens ; these petty sacrifices are not enough, and 
they renounce a husband and a home. If 
the husband cannot see the necessity, and 
cannot kiss the rod, so much the worse for 
him. His wife has the perverted pride of an 
Indian widow who flings her young life upon 
the funeral pile, jubilant at the thought of 
her own surpassing virtue.” 

“ Would you not sacrifice your happiness 
to your conscience, George, if conscience 
spoke plainly?” Mildred asked, reproach- 
fully. 

“I don’t know. Human love might be 
too strong for conscience. God knows I 
would not have sacrificed you to a simple — 
to a law made by man. God’s laws are dif- 
ferent. There is no doubt about them.” 

The evening was darkening. The night- 
ingale burst out suddenly into loud melody, 
more joyous than her reputation. Mildred 
could see the lights in the house that had 
been her home. The lamplight in the draw- 
ing-room shone across the intervening space 
of lawn and shrubberies; the broad window 
shone vividly at the end of a vista, like a 
star. Oh, lovely room! oh, happy life, so far 
off, so impossible any more I 

“Good-night and good-by,” Mildred sigh- 
ed, holding out her hand. 

“ Good by,” he answered, taking the small, 
cold hand, only to let it drop again. 

He made no inquiry as to how she had 
come there, or whither she was going. She 
had appeared to him suddenly as a spirit in 
the soft eventide, and he let her go from him 
unquestioned as if she had been a spirit. 
She felt the coldness of her dismissal, and 
yet felt that it could be no otherwise. She 
must be all to him or nothing. After love 


THE FATAL THREE. 


175 


so perfect as theirs had been there could be 
no middle course. 

She went across the meadow by the way 
she had come, and through the village street, 
where all the doors were closed at this hour 
and paraffine lamps glowed brightly in par- 
lor windows. Dear little humble street, how 
her heart yearned over it as she went silent- 
ly by like a ghost, closely veiled, a slender 
figure dressed in black ! She had been very 
fond of her villagers, had entered into their 
lives, and been a brightening influence for 
most of them, she and her child. Lola had 
been familiar with every crej^ure in the 
place, from the humped-backed cobbler at 
the corner to the gray-haired postmaster in 
the white, half - timbered cottage yonder, 
where the letter-boxes were on the other 
side of a neat little garden. Lola had enter- 
ed into all their lives, and had been glad and 
sorry with them with a power of sympathy 
which was the only precocious element in 
her nature. She had been a child in all 
things except charity. There she had been 
a w’oman. 

There was a train for Salisbury in half an 
hour, and there was a later train at ten 
o’clock. Mildred had intended to travel at 
the earlier hour, but she felt an irresistible 
inclination to linger in the beloved place 
where her happiness was buried. She want- 
ed to see some one who wculd talk to her of 
her husband, and she knew that the curate 
could be trusted, so she determined upon 
waiting for the later train in the event of 
her finding Mr. Rollinson at home. 

The paraffine lamp in the parlor over the 
carpenter’s shop was brighter than any other 
in the village, and Mr. Rollinson’s shadow 
was reflected on the blind, with the usual 
tendency towards caricature. The carpen- 
ter’s wife, who opened the door, was an old 
friend of Mrs. Greswold’s, and was not im- 
portunate in her expressions of surprise and 
pleasure. 

“Please do not mention to any one that 
I have been at Enderby, Mrs. Mason,” Mil- 
dred said, quietly; “I am only here for an 
liour or two on my way to Salisbury. I 
should like to see Mr. Rollinson, if he is dis- 
engaged.” 

“Of course he is, ma’am, for you. He’ll 
be overjoyed to see you, I’m sure.” 

Mrs. Mason bustled up the steep little stair- 


case, followed closely by Mildred. She flung 
open the door with a flourish and discover- 
ed Mr. Rollinson enjoying a tea-dinner, with 
the Twnes propped up between his plate and 
the teapot. 

He started up like a man distraught at 
sight of his visitor, darted forward and shook 
hands, and then glanced despairingly at the 
table. For such a guest he would have liked 
to have had turtle and ortolans, but a tea- 
dinner, a vulgar tea-dinner, a dish of pig’s- 
trotters, a couple of new-laid eggs, and a pile 
of buttered toast ! He had thought it a lux- 
urious meal when he sat down to it, five 
minutes ago, very sharp set. 

“ My dear Mrs. Greswold, I am enchanted. 
You have been travelling? Yes. If — if you 
would share my humble collation — but you 
are going to dine at the manor, no doubt?” 

“No; I am not going to the manor. I 
should be very glad of a cup of tea, if I may 
have one with you.” 

“ Mrs. Mason, a fresh teapot, directly, if you 
please.” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“And could not you get some dinner for 
Mrs. Greswold? A sole and a chicken, a lit- 
tle asparagus. I saw a bundle in the village 
the day before yesterday,” suggested the 
curate, feebly. 

“On no account. I could not eat any 
dinner. I will have an egg and a little toast, 
if you please,” said Mildred, seeing the 
curate’s distressed look, and not wishing to 
reject his hospitality. 

“Will you, really now? Mrs. Mason’s eggs 
are excellent; and she makes toast better than 
any one else in the world, I think,” replied 
Rollinson, flinging his napkin artfully over 
the trotters, and with a side-glance at Mrs. 
Mason which implored their removal. 

That admirable woman grasped the situa- 
tion. She whisked off the dish, and the 
curate’s plate with its litter of bones and 
mustard. She swept away crumbs, tidied 
the tea-tray, brought a vase of spring flowers 
from a chiffonniere to adorn the table, light- 
ed a pair of wax-candles on the mantle-piece, 
and gave a touch of elegance to the humble 
sitting-room, while Mildred was taking off 
her mantle and bonnet, and sinking wearily 
into Mr Rollinson’s easy-chair by the hearth, 
where a basket of fir-cones replaced the 
winter fire. 


176 


THE FATAL THREE. 


She felt glad to he with this old familiar 
friend— glad to breathe the very air of En- 
derby after her six months’ exile. 

“Your letter frightened me,” she said, 
w^hen she was alone with the curate. “I 
came to look at my husband. I could not 
help coming.” 

“Ah, dear Mrs. Greswold, if you could 
only come back for good! — nothing else is 
of any use. Have you seen him?” 

“Yes,” she sighed. 

“ And you find him sadly changed?” 

“ Sadly changed. I wish you would try 
to rouse him— to interest him in farming— 
building— politics— anything. He is so clev- 
er; he ought to have so many.” 

‘ ‘ For his mind, perhaps, but not for his 
heart. You are doing all you can to break 
that. ” 

Mildred turned her head aside with a 
weary movement, as of a creature at bay. 

“Don’t talk about it— you cannot under- 
stand. You look up to Clement Canceller, 

I think. You would respect his opinion.” 
“Yes; he is a good man.” 

“ He is— and he approves the course I have 
taken. He is my confidant and my counsel- 
lor.” 

“You could have no better adviser in a 
case of conscience, but I can but regret my 
friend’s ruined life all the same. But I will 
say no more, Mrs. Greswold. I will respect 
your reserve.” 

Mrs. Mason came bustling in with a tea- 
tray, on which her family teapot — the silver 
teapot that had been handed down from gen- 
eration to generation since the days of King 
George the Third — and her very best pink- 
and-gold china sparkled and glittered in the 
lamplight. The toast and eggs might have 
tempted an anchorite, and Mildred had eaten 
nothing since her nine o’clock breakfast. 
The strong tea revived her like good old 
wine, and she sat resting and listening with 
interest to Mr. Rollinson’s account of his 
parishioners, and the village chronicle of the 
last six months. How sweet it was to hear 
the old familiar names— to be in the old place, 
if only for a brief hour! 

“I wonder if they miss me?” she specu- 
lated. “ They never seemed quite the same 
— after— after the fever.” 

“Ah, but they know your value now. 
They have missed you sadly, and they have 


missed your husband’s old friendly interest in 
their affairs. He has given me carte hlanclie, 
and there has been no one neglected, nothing 
left undone; but they miss the old personal 
relations, the friendship of past days. You 
must not think that the poor care only for 
creature comforts and substantial benefits.” 

“ I have never thought so. And now tell 
me all you can about my husband. Does he 
receive no one?” 

“No one. People used to call upon him 
for a month or two after you left, but he nev- 
er returned their visits, he declined all invi- 
tations, and he made his friends understand 
pretty clearly that he had done with the out- 
side world. He rarely comes to the eleven 
o’clock service on Sundays, but he comes to 
the early services, and I believe he walks into 
Romsey sometimes for the evening service. 
He has not hardened his heart against his 
God.” 

“Do you see him often?” 

“About once a week. I take him my re- 
port of the sick and poor. I believe he is as 
much interested in that as he can be in any- 
thing, but I always feel that my society is a 
burden to him, in spite of his courteousness. 

I borrow a book from him sometimes, so as 
to have an excuse for spending a few minutes 
with him when I return it.” 

“You are a good man, Mr. Rollinson, a 
true friend,” said Mildred, in a low voice. 

“Would to God that my friendship could 
do more for him. Unhappily it can do so 
little.” 

The fly came back for Mildred at nine 
o’clock. She had telegraphed from Brighton 
to the inn at Salisbury where she was to spend 
the night, and her room was ready for her 
when she arrived there at half-past ten— a 
spacious bedroom with a four-post bed, in 
which she lay broad awake all night, living 
over and over again that scene beside the 
grave, and seeing her husband’s gloomy face 
and its mute reproach. She knew that she 
had done wrong in breaking in upon his sol- 
itude, she who renounced the tie that bound 
her to him; and yet there had been something 
gained. He knew now that under no stress 
of evidence could she ever believe him guilty 
of his wife’s death. He knew that his last 
and saddest secret was revealed to her, and 
that she was loyal to him, still — loyal ah 
though divided. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


She went to the morning service at the ca- 
thedral. She lingered about the grave old 
close, looking dreamily in at the gardens 
which had such an air of old-world peace. 
She was reluctant to leave Salisbury. It was 
near all that she had loved and lost. The 
place had the familiar air of the district in 
which she had lived so long — different in 
somewise from all other counties, or seem- 
ing different by fond association. 

She telegraphed to her aunt that she might 
be late in returning, and lingered on till three 
o’clock in the afternoon, and then took the 
train, which dawdled at three or four sta- 
tions before it came to Bishopstoke — the fa- 
miliar junction where the station-master and 
the superintendents knew her, and asked 
after her husband’s health, giving her a pain 
at her heart with each inquiry. She would 
have been glad to pass to the Portsmouth 
train unrecognized, but it was not to be. 

“You have been in the South all the win- 
ter, I hear, ma’am. I hope it was not on ac- 
count of your health?” 

“Yes,” she faltered, “partly on that ac- 
count,” as she hurried on to the carriage, 
which the station-master opened for her with 
his own hand. 

His face was among her home faces. She 
had travelled up and down the line so often 
in the good days that were gone— with her 
husband and Lola, and their comfort had 
been cared for almost as if they had been 
royal personages. 

It was night when she reached Brighton, 
and Franz was on the platform waiting for 
her, and the irreproachable brougham was 
drawn up close by, the brown horse snort- 
ing, and with eyes of fire, not brooking the 
vicinity of the engine, though too grand a 
creature to be afraid of it. 

She found Miss Fausset in low spirits. 

“I have missed you terribly,” she said. 
“ I am a poor creature. I used to think my- 
self independent of sympathy or companion- 
ship ; but that is all over now. When I am 
alone for two days at a stretch I feel like a 
child in the dark.” 

“You have lived too long in this house, 
aunt, I think,” Mildred answered, gently. 
“Forgive me if I say that it is a dull house.” 

“A dull house? Nonsense, Mildred. It 
is one of the best houses in Brighton.” 

“Yes, yes, aunt, but it is dull, all the same. 


177 

The sun does not shine into it ; the coloring 
of the furniture is gray and cold — ” 

“I hate gaudy colors.” 

“Yes, but there are beautiful colors that 
are not gaudy — beautiful things that warm 
and gladden one. The next room ’’—glancing 
back at the front drawing-room and its sin- 
gle lamp — “is full of ghosts. Those long 
white curtains, those faint gray walls, are 
enough to kill you.” 

“ I am not so fanciful as that.” 

“Ah, but you are fanciful, perhaps, with- 
out knowing it. The influence of this dull, 
gray house may have crept Into your veins, 
and depressed you unawares. Will you go 
to the Italian lakes with me next September, 
aunt? Or better, will you go to the west of 
England with me next week — to the north 
coast of Cornwall, which will be lovely at 
this season. I am sure you want change; 
this monstrous life is killing you.” 

“No, no, Mildred. There is nothing amiss 
with my life. It suits me well enough, and 
I am able to do good.” 

“Your lieutenants could carry on all that 
while you were away.” 

“No. I like to be here; I like to organ- 
ize, to arrange. I can feel that my life is not 
useless, that my talent is placed at interest.” 

“ It could all go on, aunt; it could, indeed. 
The change to new scenes would revive you.” 

“No. I am satisfied where I am. I am 
among people whom I like, and who like and 
respect me.” 

She dwelt upon the last words with unc- 
tion, as if there were tangible comfort in 
them. 

Mildred sighed and was silent. She had 
felt it her duty to try and rouse her aunt 
from the dull apathy into which she seemed 
gradually sinking, and she thought that the 
only chance of revival was to remove her 
from the monotony of her present existence. 

Later on in the evening the fire had been 
lighted in the inner drawing-room. Miss Faus- 
set feeling chilly in spite of the approach of 
summer, and aunt and niece drew near the 
hearth for cheerfulness and comfort. The 
low reading-lamp spread its light only over 
Miss Fausset’s book-table and the circle in 
which it stood. The faces of both women 
were in shadow, and the lofty room, with its 
walls of books, was full of shadows. 

“You talk so despondently of life some* 


178 


THE FATAL THREE. 


times, aunt, as if it had all been disappoint- 
ment,” said Mildred, after a long silence, in 
which they had both sat watching the fire, 
each absorbed by her own thoughts, “yet 
your girlhood must have been bright. I have 
heard my dear father say how indulgent Jiis 
father was — how he gave way to his children 
in everything.” 

“Yes, he was very indulgent — too indul- 
gent, perhaps. I had my own way in every- 
thing — only — one’s own way does not always 
lead to happiness. Mine did not. I might 
have been a happier woman if my father had 
been a tyrant.” 

“You would have married, perhaps, in that 
case, to escape from an unhappy home. I 
wish you would tell me more about your girl- 
ish years, aunt. You must have had many 
admirers when you were young, and among 
them all there must have been some one for 
whom you cared — just a little. Would it 
hurt you to talk to me about that old 
time?” 

“ Yes, Mildred. There are some women 
who can talk about such things, women who 
can prose for hours to their granddaughters 
or their nieces, simpering over the silliness of 
the past, boasting of conquests which nobody 
believes in; for it is very difficult to realize 
the fact that an old woman was ever young 
and lovely. I am not of that temper, Mil- 
dred. The memory of my girlhood is hate- 
ful to me.” 

“Ah, then there was some sad story — 
some unhappy attachment. I was sure it 
was so,” said Mildred, in a low voice. “ But 
tell me of that happier time before you went 
into society — the time when you were in Italy 
with your governess, studying at the Conser- 
vatoire at Milan. I thought of you so much 
when I was at Milan the other day.” 

“ I have nothing to tell about that time. I 
vras a foreigner in a strange city, with an el- 
derly woman who was said to take care of 
me, and whose chief occupation was to take 
care of herself, a solicitor’s widow, whose 
health required that she should winter in the 
South, and who contrived to make my father 
pay handsomely for her benefit.” 

“ And you were not happy at Milan?” 

“ Happy? No. I got on with my musical 
education— that was all I cared for.” 

“ Had you no friends — no introductions to 
nice people?” 


“No. My chaperon made my father be- 
lieve that she knew all the best families in 
Milan, but her circle resolved itself into a 
few third-rate musical people who gave a 
shabby little evening party now and then. 
You bore me to death, Mildred, when you 
force me to talk of that time, and of that 
woman, whom I hated. ” 

“Forgive me, aunt, I will ask no more 
questions,” said Mildred, with a sigh. 

She had been trying to get nearer to her 
aunt, to familiarize herself with that dim 
past when this fading woman was young 
and full of hope. It seemed to her as if 
there was. a dead-wall between her and Miss 
Fausset — a barrier of reserve which should 
not e,xist between they who were so near in 
blood. She had made up her mind to stay 
with her aunt to the end, to do all that duty 
and affection should suggest, and it troubled 
her that they should still be strangers. Af- 
ter this severe repulse she could make no fur- 
ther attempt. There was evidently no soft- 
ening infiuence in the memory of the past. 
Miss Fausset’s character, as revealed by that 
which she concealed rather than by that 
which she told, was not beautiful. Mildred 
could but J;hink that she had been a proud, 
cold-hearted young woman, valuing herself 
too highly to inspire love or sympathy in 
others; electing to be alone and unloved. 

After this, time went by in a dull monot- 
ony. The same people came to see Miss 
Fausset day after day, and she absorbed the 
same flatteries, accepted the same adulation, 
always with an air of deepest humility. She 
organized her charities, she listened to every 
detail about the circumstance, and even the 
mental condition and spiritual views of her 
poor. Mildred discovered before long that 
there was a leaven of hardness in her be- 
nevolence. She could not tolerate sin, she 
weighed every life in the same balance, she 
expected exceptional purity amid foulest sur- 
roundings. She was liberal of her world- 
ly goods, but her mind was as narrow as if 
she had lived in a small village a hundred 
years ago. Mildred found herself continu- 
ally pleading for wrong-doers. 

The only event or excitement which the 
bright June days brought with them was the 
arrival of Pamela Ransome, who was escort- 
ed to Brighton by Lady Lochinvar herself, 
and who had been engaged for three weeks 


THE FATAL THREE. 


179 


to Malcolm Stuart, ■with everybody’s consent 
and approval. 

“I wrote to Uncle George the very day I 
was engaged, aunt, as well as to you, and he 
answered my letter in the sweetest way, and 
he is going to give me a grand-piano,” said 
Pamela, all in a breath. 

Lady Lochinvar explained that much as 
she detested London she had felt it her sol- 
emn duty to establish herself there during 
her nephew’s engagement, in order that she 
might become acquainted with Pamela’s peo- 
ple, and assist her dear boy in all his arrange- 
ments for the future. When a young man 
marries a nice girl with an estate with fifteen 
hundred a year — allowing for the poor return 
made by land nowadays — everything ought 
to go upon velvet. Lady Lochinvar was 
prepared to make sacrifices, or, in other 
words, to contribute a handsome portion of 
that fortune which she had intended to be- 
queath to her nephew. She could afford to 
be generous, having a surplus far beyond her 
possible needs, and she was very fond of Mal- 
colm Stuart, who had been to her as a son. 

“ I was quite alone in the world when my 
husband died,” she told Mildred. “My fa- 
ther and my own people were all gone, and 
I should have been a wretched creature with- 
out Malcolm. He was the only son of Loch- 
invar’s favorite sister, who went off in a de- 
cline when he was eight years old, and he 
had been brought up at the castle. So it is 
natural, you see, that I should be fond of 
him and interested in his welfare.” 

Pamela kissed her, by way of commen- 
tary. 

“I think you are quite the dearest thing 
in the world,” she said, “except aunt Mil- 
dred.” 

It may be seen from this remark that the 
elder and younger lady were now on very 
easy terms. Pamela had stayed in Paris 
with Lady Lochinvar, and a considerable 
part of her trousseau, the outward and visible 
part, had all been chosen in the ateliers of 
fashionable Parisian dress makers and milli- 
ners. The more humdrum portion of the 
bride’s raiment was to be obtained at Brigh- 
ton, where Pamela was to spend a week or 
two with her aunt before she went to Lon- 
don to stay with the Mountfords, who had 
taken a house in Grosvenor Gardens, from 
which Pamela was to bo marrio^ 


“And where do you think we are to be 
married, aunt?” exclaimed Pamela, excitedly. 

“At St. George’s?” 

“ Nothing so humdrum. We are going to 
be married in the Abbey — in Westminster 
Abbey — the burial-place of heroes and poets. 
I happened to say one day, when Malcolm 
and I were almost strangers— it was at Rum- 
pelmeyer, sitting outside in the sun, eating 
ices — that I had never seen a wedding in the 
Abbey, and that I should love to see one, 
and Malcolm said we must try and manage 
it some day, meaning anybody’s wedding, of 
course — though he pretends now that he al- 
ways meant to marry me there himself.” 

“Presumptuous in him,” said Mildred, 
smiling. 

“Oh, young men are horridly presumpt- 
uous; they know they are in a minority — 
there is so little competition — and a plain 
young man, too, like Malcolm. But I sup- 
pose he knows he is nice,” added Pamela, 
conclusively. 

“Don’t you think it will be lovely for me 
to be married in the Abbey?” she asked, 
presently. 

“I think, dear, in your case, I would rath- 
er have been married from my own house, 
and in a village church.” 

“ What, in that pokey little church at Ma- 
pledown? I believe it is one of the oldest in 
England, and it is certainly one of the ugli- 
est. Sir Henry Mountford suggested making 
a family business of it, but Rosalind and I 
were both in favor of the Abbey. We shall 
get much better notices in the society pa- 
pers,” added Pamela, with a business-like air, 
as if she had been talking about the produc- 
tion of a new play. 

“Well, dear, as I hope you are only to be 
married once in your life you have a right to 
choose your church.” 

Pamela was bitterly disappointed present- 
ly when her aunt refused to be present at her 
wedding. 

“I will spend an hour with you on your 
wedding-morning, and see you in your wed- 
ding-gown, if you like, Pamela; but I cannot 
go among a crowd of gay people, or share in 
any festivity. I have done with all those 
things, dear, for ever and ever.” 

Pamela’s candid eyes filled with tears. 
She felt all the more sorry for her aunt be- 
cause her own cup of happiness was over- 


180 


THE FATAL THREE. 


flowing. She looked round the silver-gray 
drawing-room, and her eyes fixed themselves 
on the piano which he had played, so often, 
so often, in the tender twilight, in the shad- 
owy evening, when that larger room was left 
almost without any light save that which 
came through the undraped archway yonder. 
But Castellani was no longer a person to be 
thought of in italics. From the moment 
Pamela’s eyes had opened to the excellence 
of Mr. Stuart’s manly and straightforward 
character, they had also become aware of the 
Italian’s deficiencies. She had realized the 
fact that he was a charlatan; and now she 
looked wonderingly at the piano, at a loss to 
understand the intensity of by-gone emotions, 
and inclined to excuse herself upon the 
ground of youthful foolishness. 

“ What a silly, romantic wretch I must 
have been,” she thought*; '' a regular Rosa 
Matilda! As if the happiness of life de- 
pended upon one’s husband having an ear for 
music.” 

Mildred was by no means unsympathetic 
about the trousseau, although she herself 
had done with all interest in fashion and 
finery. She drove about to the pretty Brigh- 
ton shops with Pamela, and exercised a re- 
straining influence upon that young lady’s 
taste, which inclined to the florid. She sym- 
pathized with the young lady’s anxiety about 
her wedding-gown, which was to be made by 
a certain Mr. Smithson, z.faueuT who held 
potent sway over the ladies of fashionable 
London, and who gave himself more airs 
than a prime -minister. Mr. Smithson had 
consented to make Miss Ransome a wedding- 
gown — despite her social insignificance and 
the pressure of the season — provided that he 
were not worried about it. 

“If I have too many people calling upon 
me, or am pestered with letters, I shall throw 
the thing up,” he told Lady Moimtford one 
morning when she took him some fine old 
rose point for the petticoat. “Yes, this lace 
is pretty good. I suppose you got it in Ven- 
ice. I have seen Miss Ransome, and I know 
what kind of gown she can wear. It will 
be sent home the day before the wedding.” 

With this assurance, haughtily given. Lady 
Mountford and her sister had to be con- 
tented. 

“ If I were your sister I would let a wom- 
an in Tottenham Court Road make my^ 


gowns rather than I would stand such treat- 
ment,” said Sir Henry; at which his wife 
shrugged her shoulders and told him he 
knew nothing about it. 

“ The cut is everything,” she said. “ It is 
worth putting up with Smithson’s insolence 
to know that one is the best-dressed woman 
in the room.” 

“But if Smithson dresses all the other 
women — ” 

“He doesn’t. There are very few who 
have the courage to go to him. His man- 
ners are so humiliating — he as good as told 
me I had a hump— and his prices are enor- 
mous.” 

“And yet you called me extravagant for 
giving seventy pounds for a barb,” cried Sir 
Henry; ‘'a bird that might bring me a pot 
of money in prizes.” 

******* 

The grand question of trousseau and wed- 
ding-gown being settled, there remained only 
a point of minor importance — the honey- 
moon. Pamela was in favor of that silly 
season being spent in some rustic spot, far 
from the madding crowd, and Pamela’s lover 
was of her opinion in everything. 

“We have both seen the best part of the 
Continent,” said Pamela, taking tea in Mil- 
dred’s up stairs sitting-room, which had as- 
sumed a brighter and more home-like aspect 
in her occupation than any other room in 
Miss Fausset’s house; we don’t want to rush 
off to Switzerland or the Pyrenees; we want 
just to enjoy each other’s society and to 
make our plans for the future. Besides, 
travelling is so hideously unbecoming. I 
have seen brides with fusty hats and smuts 
on their faces who would have been misera- 
ble if they had only known how they were 
looking.” 

“I think you and Mr, Stuart are very 
wise in your choice, dear,” answered Mil- 
dred. “England in July is delicious. Have 
you decided where to go?” 

“ No, we can’t make up our minds. We 
want to find a place that is exquisitely pret- 
ty — yet not too far from London, so that we 
may run up to town occasionally and sec 
about our furnishing. Sir Henry offered us 
Rainham, but as it is both ugly and incon- 
venient I unhesitatingly refused. I don’t 
want to spend my honey-moon in a place 
pervaded by prize pigeons.” 


THE FATAL THREE. 


“What do you think of the neighborhood 
of the Thames, Pamela ?” asked Mildred, 
thoughtfully; “ are you fond of boating?” 

“Fond! I adore it. I could live all my 
life upon the river.” 

“Really! I have been thinking that if you 
and Mr. Stuart would like to spend your 
honey-moon at The Hook it is just the kind 
of place to suit you. The house is bright 
and pretty, and the gardens are exquisite.” 

Pamela’s face kindled with pleasure. 

‘ ‘ But, dear aunt, you would never think — ” 
she began. 

‘ ‘ The house is at your service, my dear girl. 
It will be a pleasure for me to prepare every- 
thing for you. I cannot tell you how dearly 
I love that house, or how full of memories 
it is for me. The lease of my father’s house 
in Parchment Street was sold after his death, 
and I only kept a few special things out of 
the furniture, but at The Hook nothing has 
been altered since I was a child.” 

Pamela accepted the offer with rapture, 
and wrote an eight-page letter to her lover 
upon the subject, although he was coming 
to Brighton next day, and was to dine in 
Lewes Crescent. Mildred was pleased at 
being able to give so much pleasure to her 
husband’s niece. It may be also that she 
snatched at an excuse for revisiting a spot 
she fondly loved. 

She offered to take Pamela with her, to ex- 
plore the house and gardens, and discuss any 
small arrangements for her own comfort, but 
against this Miss Ransome protested. 

“ I want everything to be new to us,” she 
said, “all untrodden ground, a delicious sur- 
prise. I am sure the place is lovely, and I 
want to know no more about it than I know 
of fairy-land. I haven’t the faintest notion 
what a Hook can be in connection with the 
Thames. It may be a mountain or a glacier 
for anything I know to the contrary; but I 
am assured it is delightful. Please let me 
know nothing more, dearest aunt, till I go 
there with Malcolm. It is adorable of you 
to hit upon such a splendid idea And it 
will look very well in the society papers,” 
added Pamela, waxing business-like. “ ‘ Mr. 
and Mrs. Stuart!’ — oh, how queer that sounds! 
— ‘are to spend their honey-moon at The Hook, 
the river-side residence of the bride’s aunt.’ 


181 

I wonder whether they will say ‘ the well- 
known residence?’ ” mused Pamela. 

Mildred went up to town with Miss Ran- 
some and her betrothed at the end of the 
young lady’s visit. Miss Fausset had been 
coldly gracious, after her manner ; had al- 
lowed Mr. Stuart to come to her house 
whenever he pleased, and had given up the 
rarely used front drawing-room to the lovers, 
who sat and whispered and tittered over 
their own little witticisms, by the distant 
piano, and behaved altogether like those pro- 
verbial children of whom we are told in our 
childhood, who are seen but not heard, Mil- 
dred lunched in Grosvenor Gardens, and went 
to Chertsey by an afternoon train. The house- 
keeper who had once ruled over both Mr. 
Fausset’s houses, subject to interference from 
Bell, was now care-taker at The Hook, with a 
house- maid under her. She was an elderly 
woman, but considerably Bell’s junior, and 
she was an admirable cook and manager. A 
telegram two days before had told her to 
expect her mistress, and the 'house was in 
perfect order when Mrs. Greswold arrived 
in the summer twilight. All things had been 
made to look as if the place were in family 
occupation, although no one but the two serv- 
ants had been living there since Mr. Faus- 
set’s death. The familiar look of the rooms 
smote Mildred with a sudden unexpected 
pain. There were the old lamps burning 
on the tables, the well - remembered vases — • 
her mother’s choice, and always artistic in 
form and color — filled with the old June 
flowers from garden and hot -house. Her 
father’s chair stood in its old place in the 
bay-window in front of the table at which 
he used to write his letters sometimes, look- 
ing out at the river between whiles. Mrs. 
Dawson had put a lamp in his study, a 
small room opening out of the drawing- 
room, and with windows on two sides, and 
both looking towards the river, which he 
had loved so well. The windows were open 
in the twilight, and the rose garden was like 
sea of bloom. 

His room — nothing was altered here. As 
it had been in the last days he had lived' 
here, so it was now. 

‘ ‘ I haven’t moved so much as a pen-hold- 
er, ma’am,” said Dawson, tearfully. 


182 


THE FATAL THREE. 


CHAPTER V. 

LITERA SCRIRTA MANET. 


The house and grounds were in such per- 
fect order that there was very little to be 
done in the way of preparation for the hon- 
ey-moon visitors. Even the pianos had been 
periodically tuned, and the clocks had been 
regularly wound. Two or three servants 
would have to be engaged for the period, 
and that was all; and even this want Mrs. 
Dawson proposed to supply without going 
off the premises. 

The house-maid had a sister who was an 
accomplished parlor-maid and carver. The 
under-gardener’s eldest daughter was pining 
for a prelimina,ry canter in the kitchen, and 
the gardener’s wife was a retired cook, and 
would be delighted to take all the rougher 
part of the cooking, while Mrs. Dawson de- 
voted her art to those pretty tiny kickshaws 
in which she excelled. There were peaches 
ripening in the peach -house, and the apri- 
cots were going to be a show. There was 
wine in the cellar that would have satisfied 
an alderman on his honey-moon. Mildred’s 
business at The Hook might have been com- 
pleted in a day, yet she lingered there for a 
week, and still lingered on, loving the place 
with a love which was mingled with pain, 
yet happier there than she could have been 
anywhere else in the world, she thought. 

The chief- gardener rowed her about the 
river, never going very far from home, but 
meandering about the summer stream, by 
summery meadows and reedy eyots, and 
sometimes diverging into a tributary stream, 
where the shallow water seemed only an ex- 
cuse for wild-fiowers. He had rowed her up 
and down those same streams when she was 
a child with streaming hair, and he was the 
under-gardener. He had rowed her about in 
that brief summer season when Fay was her 
companion. 

She revisited all those spots in which she 
had wandered with her lover. She would 
land here or there along the island, and as 
she remembered each particular object in 
the landscape, her feet seemed to grow light 


again— with the lightness of joyous youth — 
as they touched the familiar shore. It was 
almost as if her youth came back to her. 

Thus it was that she lingered from day to 
day, loath to leave the beloved place. She 
wrote frankly to her aunt, sayiug how much 
good the change of air and scene had done 
her, and promising to return to Brighton in 
a few days. She felt that it was her duty to 
resume her place beside that fading exist- 
ence ; and yet it was an infinite relief to her 
to escape from that dull, gray house and the 
dull, gray life. She acknowledged to herself 
that her aunt’s life was a good life, full of 
unselfish work and large charity, and yet 
there was something that repelled her, even 
while she admired. It was too much like a 
life lived up to a certain model, adjusted line 
by line to a carefully studied plan. There 
was a lack of spontaneity, a sense of perpet- 
ual effort. The benevolence which had made 
Enderby village like one family in the sweet 
time that was gone had been of a very differ- 
ent character. There had been the warmth 
of love and sympathy in every kindness of 
George Greswold’s, and there had been infi- 
nite pity for wrong-doers. Miss Fausset’s 
alms-giving was after the fashion of the Phar- 
isee of old, and it was upon the amount given 
that she held herself justified before God, not 
upon the manner of giving. 

In those quiet days, spent alone in her old 
home, Mildred had chosen to occupy Mr. 
Fausset’s study rather than the large bright 
drawing-room. The smaller room was more 
completely associated with her father. It 
was here, seated in this chair before the writ- 
ing-table, where she was sitting now, that he 
had first talked to her of George Greswold, 
and had discussed her future life, question- 
ing his motherless girl with rnore than a fa- 
ther’s tenderness about the promptings of 
her own heart. She loved the room and all 
that it contained for the sake of the cher- 
ished hands that had touched these things, 
I and the gentle life that had been lived here. 


THE FATAL THREE. 


183 


There had been but one error in his life, she 
thought — his treatment of Fay. 

“He ought not to have sent her away,” 
she thought; “he saw us happy together, 
his two daughters, and he ought not to have 
divided us, and sent her away to a loveless 
life among strangers. If he had only been 
frank and straightforward with my mother 
she might have forgiven all.” 

Might, perhaps. Mildred was not sure 
upon that point; but she felt very sure that 
it was her father’s duty to have braved all 
consequences rather than to have sent his 
unacknowledged child into exile. That fact 
of not acknowledging her seemed in itself 
such a tremendous cruelty that it intensified 
every lesser wrong. 

Mrs. Dawson understood her mistress’s 
fancy for her father’s room, and Mildred’s 
meals were served here at a Sutherland ta- 
ble in the bay-window, from which she could 
see the boats go by, Mrs. Dawson having a 
profound belief in the efficacy of the boats 
as a cure for low spirits. 

“People sometimes tell me it must be dull 
at The Hook,” she said; “but, lor, they don’t 
know how many boats go by in summer- 
time. It’s almost as gay as Bond Street.” 

Mildred lived with old memories in the 
flower - scented room, where the Spanish 
blinds made a cool and shadowy atmos- 
phere, while the roses outside were steeped 
in sunshine. Those few days were just the 
most perfect summer-days of the year. She 
felt sorry that they had not been reserved 
for Pamela’s honeymoon. Such sunshine 
was almost wasted on her, whose heart was 
so full of sadness. 

It was her last afternoon at The Hook, or 
the afternoon which she meant to be her last, 
having made up her mind to go back to 
Brighton and duty on the following day, 
and she had a task before her, a task which 
she had delayed from day to day, just as she 
had delayed her return to her aunt. 

She had to put away those special and par- 
ticular objects which had belonged to her 
father and mother, and had been a part of 
their lives. These were too sacred to be left 
about, now that strangers were to occupy the 
rooms of the dead. Hitherto no stranger 
had entered those rooms since John Fausset’s 
death, nothing had been removed or altered. 
No documents relating to property or busi- 


ness of any kind had been kept at The Hook. 
Mr. Fausset’s affairs had all been put in per- 
fect order after his wife’s death, and there 
had been no ransacking for missing title- 
deeds or papers of any kind. It had been 
understood that all papers and letters of im- 
portance were either with Mr. Fausset’s so- 
licitors or at the house in Parchment Street, 
and thus the household gods had been un- 
disturbed in the summer retreat by the river. 

Mildred had spent the morning in her 
mother’s rooms, putting away all those dain- 
ty trifles and prettinesses which had gathered 
round the frivolous, luxurious life, as shells 
and bright-colored weeds gather among the 
low rocks on the edge of the sea. She had 
placed everything carefully in a large closet 
in her mother’s dressing-room, covered with 
much tissue-paper, secure from dust and 
moth ; and now she began the same kind of 
work in her father’s room, the work of re- 
moving all those objects which had been 
especially his. The old-fashioned silver ink- 
stand, the well-worn scarlet morocco blot- 
ting-book, with his crest on the cover, and 
many ink spots on the leather lining inside, 
his pen -holders and penknives, and a little 
velvet pen -wiper which she had made for 
him when she was ten years old, and which 
he had kept on his table ever afterwards. 

She looked round the room thoughtfully 
for a place of security for these treasures. 
She had spent a good deal of time in rear- 
ranging her father’s books, which careful 
and conscientious dusting had reduced to a 
chaotic condition. Now every volume was 
in its place, just as lie had kept them in the 
old days when it had been her delight to ex- 
amine the shelves and to carry away a book 
of her father’s choosing. 

The bookcases were by Chippendale, with 
fretwork cornices and mahogany panelling. 
The. lower part was devoted to cupboards, 
which her father had always kept under 
lock and key, but which she supposed to 
contain only old magazines, pamphlets, and 
newspapers, part of that vast mass of liter- 
ature which is kept with a view to being 
looked at some day, and which finally drifts 
unread to the bourn of all waste paper, and 
is ground into pulp again, and rolls over the 
endless web again, and comes back upon the 
world printed with more intellectual food 
for the million of skippers and skimmers. 


184 


THE FATAL THREE. 


Yes, one of those mahogany panelled cup- 
boards would serve Mildred’s purpose ad- 
mirably. She selected a key from one of 
the bunches in her key-box, and opened the 
cupboard nearest the door. 

It was packed tight with army lists, new 
monthly magazines, and Edinburgh Reviews 
— packed so well that there was scarcely an 
interstice that would hold a pin. She opened 
the next cupboard. Sporting magazines, 
Blackwood, Ainsworth, and a pile of pam- 
phlets. No room there. 

She opened the tliird, and found it much 
more loosely packed, with odd newspapers, 
and old prayer-books and Bibles, shabby, 
old-fashioned books, which had served for 
the religious exercises of several generations 
of Faussets, and had been piously preserved 
by the owner of The Hook. There was room 
here perhaps for the things in the writing- 
table, if all these books and papers were re- 
arranged and closely packed. 

Mildred began her work patiently. She 
was in no hurry to have done with her task. 
It brought her nearer to her beloved dead. 
She worked slowly, dreamily almost, her 
thoughts dwelling on the days that were 
gone. 

She took out the prayer-books and Bibles 
one by one, looking at a fly - leaf now' and 
then. “John Fausset, from his loving moth- 
er, on the day of his confirmation, June 17, 
1835.” “ Lucy Jane Fausset, with her sister 
Maria’s love, April 3, 1804.” ‘ ‘ Mark Fausset, 
in memory of little Charlie, December 1, 
1807.” Such inscriptions as tkese touched 
her, with their reminiscences of vanished 
affection, of hearts long mingled with the 
dust. 

She put the books on one side in a little 
pile on the carpet, as she knelt before the 
open cupboard, and then she began to move 
the loose litter of newspapers. The Morn- 
ing Herald, the Morning Chronicle, the Sun. 
Even these were of the dead. 

The cupboard held much more than she 
had expected. Behind the newspapers there 
were two rows of pigeon-holes, twenty-six in 
all, filled — chokefull, some of them — with 
letters, folded longwise in a thoroughly busi- 
ness-like manner. 

Old letters, old histories of the family 
heart and mind, how much they hold to stir 
the chords of joy and pain! Mildred’s hand 


trembled as she stretched it out to take one 
of those letters, idly, full of morbid curiosity 
about those relics of a past life. 

She never knew whether it had been delib- 
eration or hazard which guided her hand to 
the sixth pigeon-hole, but she thought after- 
wards that her eye must have been caught 
by a bit of red ribbon— a spot of bright color 
— and that her hand followed her eye me- 
chanically. However this may have been, 
the first thing that she took from the mass 
of divers correspondence in the twenty-six 
pigeon-holes was a packet of about twenty 
letters tied with a red ribbon. 

Each letter was carefully indorsed, M. F. 
and a date. Some were on foreign paper, 
others on thick gilt-edged note. A glance 
at the uppermost letter showed her a famil- 
iar handwriting — her aunt’s, but very differ- 
ent from Miss Fausset’s present precise pen- 
manship. The writing here was more hurried 
and irregular, bolder, larger, and more indic- 
ative of impulse and emotion. 

No thought of possible wrong to her aunt 
entered Mildred’s mind as she untied the rib- 
bon, seated herself in a low chair in front of 
the bookcase, with the letters loose in her lap. 
What secrets could there be in a girl’s let- 
ters to her elder brother which the brother’s 
daughter might not read, nearly forty years 
after they were written? What could there 
be in that yellow paper, in that faded ink, 
except the pale, dim ghosts of vanished fan- 
cies and thoughts which the thinker had long 
outlived? 

“I wonder whether my aunt w^ould like 
to read these old letters?” mused Mildred. 
“ It would be like calling up her own ghost. 
She must have almost forgotten what she 
was like when she wrote them.” 

The first letter was from Milan, full of en- 
thusiasm about the cathedral and the Con- 
servatoire, full of schemes for work. She 
was practising six hours a day, and taking 
nine lessons a week — four for piano, two for 
singing, three for harmony. She was in high 
spirits, and delighted with her life. 

“I should practise eight hours a day if 
Mrs. Holmby would let me,” she wrote, “but 
she won’t. She says it would be too much 
for my health. I believe it is only because 
my piano annoys her. I get up at five on 
these summer mornings, and practise from 
six to half-past eight, then coffee and rolls, 


THE FATAL THREE. 


and off to tlie Conservatoire. Then a drive 
^vith Mrs. Holmby, who is too lazy to walk 
much; and then lunch. After lunch vespers 
at the cathedral, and then two hours at the 
piano before dinner. An hour and a half be- 
tween dinner and tea, which we take at nine. 
Sometimes one of Mrs. Hohnby’s friends 
drops in to tea. You needn’t be afraid — the 
men are all elderly, and not particularly 
clean. They take snuff, and their complex- 
ions are like mahogany; but there is one old 
man, with bristly gray hair standing out all 
over Lis head like a brush, who plays the 
’cello divinely, and who reminds me of Bee- 
thoven. I am learning the Sonate Pathetique, 
and I play Bach’s preludes and fugues two 
hours a day. We went to La Scala the night 
before last, but I was disappointed to find 
they were playing a trumpery modern opera 
by a Milanese composer, who is all the rage 
here.” 

Two or three letters followed, all in the 
same strain, and then came signs of discon- 
tent. 

“ I have no doubt Mrs. Holmby is a high- 
ly respectable person, and I am sure you act- 
ed for the best when you chose her for my 
chaperon, but she is a lump of prejudice. 
She objects to the cathedral. ‘We are fully 
justified in making ourselves familiar with 
its architectural beauties,’ she said, in her pe- 
dantic way, ‘but to attend the services of 
that benighted church is to worship in the 
groves of Baal.’ I told her that I had found 
neither groves nor idols in that magnificent 
church, and that the music I heard there was 
the only pleasure which reconciled me to the 
utter dulness of my life at Milan — I was go- 
ing to say, my life with her, but thought it 
better to be polite, as I am quite in her power 
till you come to fetch me. 

“Don’t think that I am tired of the Con- 
servatoire, after teasing you so to let me come 
here, or even that I am homesick. I am only 
tired of Mrs. Holmby, and I dare say, after 
all, she is no worse than any other chaperon 
would be. As for the Conservatoire, I adore 
it, and I feel that I am making rapid strides 
in my musical education. My master is 
pleased with my playing of the Pathetique, 
and I am to take the Ph'oica next. What a 
privilege it is to know Beethoven ! He seems 
to me now like a familiar friend. I have 
been reading a memoir of him. What a sad j 


185 

life! What a glorious legacy he leaves the 
world which treated him so badly I 

“I play Diabelli’s exercises for an hour 
and a half every morning before I look at 
any other music.” 

In the next letter Mildred started at the 
appearance of a familiar name. 

“Your kind suggestion about the Opera 
House has been followed, and we have taken 
seats at La Scala for two nights a week. 
Signor Castellani’s opera is really very charm- 
ing. I have heard it now three times, and 
liked it better each time. There is not much 
learning in the orchestration, but there is a 
great deal of melody all through the opera. 
The Milanese are mad about it. Signor Cas- 
tellani came to see Mrs. Holmby one evening 
last week, introduced by our gray -haired 
’cello player. He is a clever-looking man, 
about five-and-thirty, with a rather melan- 
choly air. He writes his librettos, and is 
something of a poet. 

“We have made a compromise about the 
cathedral. I am to go to vespers if I like, 
as my theological opinions are not in Mrs. 
Holmby’s keeping. She will walk with me 
to the cathedral, leave me at the bottom of 
the steps, do her shopping or take a gentle 
walk, and return for me when the service is 
over. It lasts only three-quarters of an hour, 
and Mrs. Holmby always has shopping of 
some kind on her hands, as she does all her 
own marketing, and buys everything in the 
smallest quantities. I suppose by this means 
she makes more out of your handsome al- 
lowance for my board, or fancies she does.” 

There were more letters in the same strain, 
and Castellani’s name appeared often in re- 
lation to his operas ; but there was no fur- 
ther mention of social intercourse. The let- 
ters grew somewhat fretful in tone, and there 
were repeated complaints of Mrs. Holmby. 
There were indications of fitful spirits — now 
enthusiasm, now depression. 

“I have at least discovered that I am no 
genius,” she wrote. “When I attempt to 
improvise, the poverty of my ideas freezes 
me; and yet music with me is a passion. 
Those vesper services in the cathedral are^ 
my only consolation in this great dull town. 

“No, dear Jack, I am not homesick. I 
have to finish my musical education. I am 
tired of nothing, except Mrs. Holmby.” 

After this there was an interval. The next 


186 


THE FATAL THREE. 


letter was dated six months later. It was on 
a different kind of paper, and it was written 
from Evian, on the Lake of Geneva. Even 
the character of the penman.ship had altered. 
It had lost its girlish dash, and something of 
its firmness. The strokes were heavier, but 
yet bore traces of hesitation. It was alto- 
gether a feebler style of writing. 

The letter began abruptly — 

“ I know that you have been kind to me, 
John — kinder, more merciful than many 
brothers would have been under the same 
miserable circumstances; but nothing you 
can do can make me anything else than what 
I have made myself — the most wretched of 
creatures. When I walk about in this quiet 
place, alone, and see the beggars holding out 
their hands to me — maimed, blind, dumb, 
perhaps, the very refuse of humanity — I feel 
that their misery is less than mine. They 
were not brought up to think highly of them- 
selves, and to look down upon other people, 
as I was. They were never petted and ad- 
mired as I was. They were not brought up 
to think honor the one thing that makes life 
worth living — to feel the sting of shame 
worse than the sting of death. They fall 
into raptures if I give them a franc — and all 
the wealth of the world would not give me 
one hour of happiness. You tell me to for- 
get my misery. Forget — now ! No, I have 
no wish to leave this place. I should be nei- 
ther better nor happier anywhere else. It is 
very quiet here. There are no visitors left 
now in the neighborhood. There is no one 
to wonder who I am, or why I am living 
alone here in my tiny villa. The days go 
by like a long weary dream, and there are 
days when the gray lake and the gray mount- 
ains are half hidden in mist, and when all 
nature seems of the same color as my own 
life. 

‘ ‘ I received the books you kindly chose for 
me, a large parcel. There is a novel among 
them which tells almost my owji story. It 
made me shed tears for the first time since you 
left me at Lausanne. Some people say they 
find a relief in tears, but my tears are not of 
that kind. I was ill for nearly a week after 
reading that story. Please don’t send me 
any more novels. If they are about happy 
people they irritate me — if they are sorrow- 
ful stories, they make me just a shade more 


wretched than I am always. If you send 
me books again let them be the hardest kind 
of reading you can get. I hear there is a 
good book on natural history by a man called 
Darwin. I should like to read that. 

“Gratefully and affectionately your sister, 

“M. F.” 

This letter was dated October. The next 
was written in November from the same ad- 
dress : 

“No, my dear John, your fears were un- 
founded, I have not been ill. I wish I had 
been — sick unto death ! I have been too 
wretched to write, that was all. Why should 
I distress you with a reiteration of my mis- 
ery t — and I cannot write, or think about any- 
thing else. I have no doubt Darwin’s book 
is good, but I could not interest myself in it. 
The thought of my own misery comes be- 
tween me and every page I read. 

“You ask me what I mean to do with my 
life when my dark days are over. To that 
question there can be but one answer. I 
mean, so far as it is possible, to forget. I shall 
go down to my grave burdened with my dis- 
mal secret; but I shall exercise every faculty 
I possess to keep that secret till the end. He 
is not likely to betray me. The knowledge 
of his own baseness will seal his lips. 

“Your suggestion of a future home in 
some quiet village — either in England or 
abroad — is kindly meant, I know, but I shud- 
der at the mere idea of such a life : to pass 
as a widow — to have to answer every prying 
acquaintance — the doctor, the clergyman — 
people who would force themselves upon me, 
however secluded my life might be ; to de- 
vote myself to a duty which in every hour 
of my existence would remind me of my fol- 
ly and of my degradation. I should live 
like the galley-slave who drags his chain at 
every step. 

“You tell me that the tie whieh would be 
a sorrow in the beginning might grow into a 
blessing. That could never be. You know 
very little of a woman’s nature when you 
suggest such a possibility. What can your 
sex know of a woman’s agony under such 
circumstances as mine? You are never made 
to feel the sting of dishonor.” 

• A light began to dawn upon Mildred as 
she read this second letter from Evian. The 
first might mean anything— an engagement 


THE FATAL THREE. 


187 


broken off— a proud girl jilted by a worth- 
less lover — the sense of degradation that a 
woman feels in having loved unwisely — in 
having wasted confidence and affection upon 
an unworthy object. Mildred had so inter- 
preted that despairing letter; but the second 
revealed a deeper wound, a darker misery. 

There were sentences that stood out from 
the context with unmistakable meaning : 
“When my dark days are over” — “to pass 
as a v^idow” — “to devote myself to a duty 
which would remind me of my folly and of 
my degradation.” 

That suggestion of a secluded life — of a 
care which should grow into a blessing — 
could mean only one thing. The wretched 
girl who wrote that letter was about to be- 
come a mother under conditions which meant 
life-long dishonor. 

White as marble, and with hands that 
trembled convulsively as they held the let- 
ter, Mildred Greswold read on, hurriedly, 
eagerly, breathlessly, to the last line of the 
last letter. She had no scruples, no sense 
of wrong-doing. The secret hidden in that 
little packet of letters was a secret which she 
had aright to know — she, above all other 
people— she who had been cheated and fool- 
ed by false imaginings. 

The third letter from Evian was dated late 
in January: 

“ I have been very ill — dangerously, I be- 
lieve; but my doctor took unnecessary trou- 
ble to cure me, and I am now able to go out- 
of-doors again, and I walk by the lake for 
half an hour every day in the morning sun. 
The child thrives wonderfully, I am told; 
but if there is to be a change of nurses, as 
there must be — for this woman here must 
lose sight of her charge and of me when I 
leave this place — the change cannot be made 
too soon. If Boulogne is really the best 
place you can think of, your plan would be 
to meet me with the nurse at Dijon, where 
we can take the rail. We shall post from 
here to that town. I am very sorry to in- 
flict so much trouble upon you, but it is a 
part of my misery to be a burden to you as 
well as to myself. AVhen once this incubus 
is safely disposed of, I shall be less trouble- 
some to you. 

“ No, my dear John, there is no relenting, 
no awakening of maternal love. For me that 
must remain forever a meaningless phrase. 


For me there can be nothing now, or ever- 
more, except a sense of aversion and horror, 
a shrinking from the very image of the child 
that must never call me mother or know the 
link between us. All that can possibly sever 
that link I shall do; and I entreat you, by 
the love of past years, to help me in so doing. 
My only chance of peace in the future is in 
total severance. Remember that I am pre- 
pared to make any sacrifice that can secure 
the happiness of this wretched being, that 
can make up to her — ” 

“That can make up to Tier!'" 

Mildred’s clutch tightened upon the letter. 
This was the first mention of the infant’s 
sex. 

“For the dishonor to which she is born. 
I will gladly devote half my fortune to her 
maintenance and her future establishment in 
life, if she should grow up and marry. Re- 
member also that I have sworn to myself 
never to entertain any proposal of marriage, 
never to listen to words of love from any 
man upon earth. You need have no fear 
of future embarrassment on my account. I 
shall never give a man the right to interro- 
gate my past life. I resign myself to a soli- 
tary existence, but not to a life clouded with 
shame. When I go back to England and 
resume my place in society, I shall try to 
think of this last year of agony as if it were 
a bad dream. You alone know my secret, 
and you can help me if you will. My prayer 
is that from the hour I see the child trans- 
ferred to the new nurse at Dijon I shall 
never look upon its face again. The nurse 
can go back to her home as fast as the train 
will carry her; and I can go back to London 
with you.” 

The next letter was written seven years 
later, and addressed from Kensington Gore : 

“ I suppose I ought to answer your long 
letter by saying that I am glad the child has 
good health, that I rejoice in her Avelfare, 
and so on ; but I cannot be such a hypocrite. 
It hurts me to write about her; it hurts me 
to think of her. My heart hardens itself 
against her at every suggestion of her quick- 
ness or her prettiness, or any other merit. 
To me she can be nothing except disgrace. 
I burned your letter the instant it was read. 
I felt as if some one was looking over my 
shoulder as I read it. I dared not go down 
to lunch for fear Mrs. Winstanley’s search- 


188 


THE FATAL THREE. 


ing eyes should read my secret in my face. 
I pretended a headache and stayed in my 
room till our eight - o’clock dinner, when 
1 knew I should be safe in the dim, relig- 
ious light which my chaperon affects as 
the most flattering to wrinkles and pearl 
powder. 

‘ ‘ But I am not ungrateful, my dear John. 
I am touched even by your kindly interest 
in that unfortunate waif. I have no doubt 
you have done wisely in placing her with the 
good old lady at Barnes, and that she is very 
happy running about the common. I am 
glad I know where she is, so that I may nev- 
er drive that way, if I can possibly help it. 
Your old lady must be rather a foolish wom- 
an, I should think, to change Fanny into Fay, 
on the strength of the child’s airy movements 
and elfin appearance; but as long as this per- 
son knows nothing of her charge’s history her 
silliness cannot matter.” 

A letter of a later date was addressed from 
Lewes Crescent : 

“I am horrified at what you have done. 
Oh, John! how could you be so reckless, so 
forgetful of my reiterated entreaties to keep 
that girl’s existence wide apart from mine, 
or yours? And you have actually introduced 
her into your own house as a relation ; and 
you actually allow her to be called by your 
name! Was ever such madness? You stulti- 
fy all that has been done in the past. You 
open the door to questionings and conjectures 
of the most dreadful kind. No, I will not 
see her. You must be mad to suggest such 
a thing. My feeling about her to-day is ex- 
actly the same as my feeling on the day she 
was born — disgust, horror, dread. I will 
never — willingly — look upon her face. 

“ Do you remember those words in ‘ Bleak 
House?’ — ‘ Your mother, Esther, is your dis- 
grace and you were hers.’ So it is with that 
girl and me. Can love be possible where 
there is this mutual disgrace? 

‘ ‘ For God’s sake get the girl out of your 
house as soon as you can. Send her to some 
good school abroad — France, Germany, 
where you like, and save me from the possi- 
bility of discovery. My secret has been kept 
— my friends look up to me. I have out- 
lived the worst part of my misery, and have 
learned to take some interest in life. I could 
not survive the discovery of my wretched 
story.” 


A later letter was briefer and more busi- 
ness-like : 

‘ ‘ I fully concur in the settlement you pro- 
pose, and would as willingly make the sum 
£40,000 as £30,000. Remember that so far 
as money can go I am anxious to do the utter- 
most. I hope she will marry soon, and mar- 
ry well, and that she may lead a happy and 
honorable life under a new name — a name 
that she can bear without a blush. I should 
be much relieved if she could continue to 
live abroad.” 

This was the last letter in the bundle tied 
with red ribbon. In the same pigeon-hole 
Mildred found the draft of a deed of gift, 
transferring £30,000, India stock, to Fanny 
Fausset, otherwise Vivien Faux, on her twen- 
ty-first birthday, and with the draft there 
were several letters from a firm of solicitors 
in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, relating to the same 
deed of gift. 

The last of the letters fell from Mildred’s 
lap, as she sat with her hands clasped before ’ 
her face, dazed by this sudden light which 
altered the aspect of her life. 

“ Fool, fool, fool !” she cried. The thought 
of all she had suffered, and of the suffering 
she had inflicted on the man she loved, almost 
maddened her. She had condemned her fa- 
ther — her generous, noble - hearted father — 
upon evidence that had seemed to her incon- 
trovertible. She had believed in a stain upon 
that honorable life-had believed him a sin- 
ner and a coward. And Miss Fausset knew 
all that she had forfeited by that fatal mis- 
apprehension, and yet kept her shameful se- 
cret, caring for her own reputation more 
than for two blighted lives. 

She remembered how she had appealed to 
her aunt to solve the mystery of Fay’s par- 
entage, and how deliberately Miss Fausset 
had declared her ignorance. She had ad- 
vised her niece to go back to her husband, 
but that was all. 

Mildred gathered the letters together, tied 
them with the faded ribbon, and then went to 
her father’s writing-table and wrote these lines, 
in a hand that trembled with indignation: 

“I know all the enclosed letters can tell 
me. You have kept your secret at the haz- 
ard of breaking two hearts. I know not if 
the wrong you have done me can ever be set 
right, but this I know, that I shall never again 


THE FATAL THREE. 


189 


enter your house or look upon your face if I 
can help it. I am going back to my husband, 
never again to leave him, if he will let me 
stay. Mildred Greswold.” 

She packed the letters securely, in one of 
the large banker’s envelopes out of her fa- 
ther’s desk. She sealed the packet with her 
father’s crest, intending to register and post 
it with her own hands, on her way to Rom- 


sey. And then, with a heart that beat with 
almost too suffocating force, she consulted 
the time-table, and tried to match trains be- 
tween Reading and Basingstoke. 

There was a train from Chertsey to Read- 
ing at five. She might catch that, and be 
home — home — home — how the word thrilled 
her ! — some time before midnight. She would 
have gone back if it had been to arrive in the 
dead of night. 


CHAPTER VI. 

MARKED BY FATE. 


It was nearly ten o’clock when Mildred 
drove through the village of Enderby, and 
saw the lights burning in the familiar cottage 
windows, the Post-oflSce, and the little fancy- 
shops where Lola had been so constant a 
purchaser in the days gone by. Her eyes 
were full of tears as she looked at the little 
street — happy tears, for her heart thrilled 
with hf)pe as she drew near home. 

“ He cannot withhold his forgiveness,” she 
told herself. “He knows that I acted for 
conscience’ sake.” 

Five minutes more and she was standing 
in the hall, questioning the footman, who 
stared at her with a bewildered air, as the 
most unexpected of visitors. 

. “Is your master at home?” she asked. 

“Yes, ma’am, master’s in the lib’rery; shall 
I announce you?” 

“ No, no — I can find him. Help my maid 
to take my things to my room.” 

“Yes, ma’am. Have you dined, or shall 
I tell the cook to get something ready?” 

“No, no. I have dined,” she answered, 
hurriedly, and w'ent on to the library, to that 
very room in which she had made the fatal 
discovery of Fay’s identity with her hus- 
band’s first wife. 

He was sitting in the lamplight, just as he 
was sitting that night when she fell fainting 
at his feet. The windows were open to the 
summer night, books were scattered about 
on the table, and heaped on the fioor by his 
side. Whatever comfort there may be in 
such company, he had surrounded himself 
with that comfort. He took no notice of the 


I opening of the door, and she was kneeling at 
his feet before he knew that she was in the 
room. 

‘ ‘ Mildred, what does this mean ? Have we 
not parted often enough?” 

“ There was no reason for our parting — ex- 
cept my mistaken belief. I am here to stay 
with you till my death, if you will have me, 
George. Be merciful to me, my dearest. I 
have acted for conscience’ sake. I have been 
fooled, deluded, by appearances which might 
have deceived any one, however wise. For- 
give me, George, forgive me for the sake of 
all I have suffered in doing what I thought 
to be my duty.” 

He lifted her from her knees, took her to 
his heart without a word, and kissed her. 
There was a silence of some moments, in 
which each could hear the throbbing of the 
other’s heart. 

“You were wrong after all, then,” he said 
at last, “Vivien was not your half-sister?” 

“ She was not.” 

“Whose child was she, then?” 

“You must not ask me that, George. It 
is a secret which I ought not to tell even to 
you. She was cruelly used, poor girl, more 
cruelly even than I thought she had been, 
when I believed she was my father’s daugh- 
ter. I have undeniable evidence as to her 
parentage. She was my blood-relation, but 
she was not my sister.” 

“ How did you make the discovery ?”'’ 

“By accident — this afternoon at The Hook. 
I found some papers and letters of my father’s 
in a cupboard below the bookcase. I knew 


THE FATAL THREE. 


WO 

nothing of their existence — should never have 
thought of searching for private papers there, 
for I had heard my father often say he kept 
only magazines and pamphlets — things he 
called rubbish — in those cupboards. I want- 
ed to put away some things — and I stumbled 
on a packet of letters which revealed the se- 
cret of Fay’s birth. I can come back to my 
duty with a clear conscience. May I stay 
with you, George?” 

“May you? Well, yes, I suppose,” with 
another kiss, and a tender little laugh, “one 
cannot make a broken vase new again, but 
we may pick up the pieces and stick them 
together again — somehow. You have taken 
a good many years out of my life, Mildred — 
and I doubt if you can give them back to 
me. I feel twenty years older than I felt be- 
fore the beginning of this trouble — but now 
all is known, and you are my wife again — 
well, there may be a few years of gladness 
for us yet. We will make the most of them. ” 

All things dropped back into the old grooves 
at Enderby Manor. Mrs. Greswold and her 
husband were seen together at church on the 
Sunday morning after Mildred’s return, much 
to the astonishment of the congregation, who 
immediately began to disbelieve in all their 
own convictions and assertions of the past 
half-year, and to opine that the lady had only 
been in the South for her health, more es- 
pecially as it was known that Miss Ransome 
had been her travelling companion. 

“If she had quarrelled with her husband 
she would hardly have had her husband’s 
niece with her all the time,” said Mrs. Por- 
ter, the doctor’s wife. 

“But if there was no quarrel, why did he 
shut himself up like a hermit, and look so 
wretched if one happened to meet him?” 
asked somebody else. 

“ Well, there she is, anyhow, and she looks 
out of health, so you may depend some Lon- 
don physician ordered her abroad. They 
might as well have consulted Porter, who 
ought to know her constitution by this time. 
He’d have ordered her to Ventnor for the 
winter, and saved them both a good deal of 
trouble; but there — people never think they 
can be cured without going to Cavendish 
Square.” 

Mildred’s strength seemed to fail her more 
in the happiness of that unhoped for reunion 


than it had ever done during her banishment. 
She wanted to do so much at Enderby; to 
visit about among her shabby-genteel old la- 
dies and her cottagers, as in the cloudless time 
before Lola’s death; to superintend her gar- 
den; to visit old friends whose faces were 
endeared by fond association with the past; 
to be everywhere with her husband, walking 
with him in the copses, riding about the farms 
and on the edge of the forest, in the dewy 
summer mornings. She wanted to do all 
these things, and she found that her strength 
would not let her. 

“ I hope that my health is not going to give 
way, just when I am so happy,” she said to 
her husband one day, when she felt almost 
fainting after their morning ride. 

He took alarm instantly, and sent off for 
Mr. Porter, though Mildred made light of her 
feelings next moment. The family practi- 
tioner sounded her with the usual profes- 
sional gravity, but his face grew more serious 
as he listened to the beating of her heart. He 
affected, however, to think very little of her 
ailments, talked of nerves, and suggested bro- 
mide of something, as if it were infallible; 
but when George Greswold went out into the 
hall with him he owned that all was not 
right. 

“The heart is weak,” he said. “I hope 
there may be no organic mischief, but — ” 

“You mean that I shall lose her?” inter- 
rupted Greswold, in a husky whisper. 

His own heart was beating like the tolling 
of a church -bell — beating with the dull, 
heavy stroke of despair. 

“No, no. I don’t think there’s any imme- 
diate danger, but I should like you to take 
higher advice — Clarke or Jenner, perhaps — ” 

“ Of course. I shall send for some one at 
at once — ” 

“ The very thing to alarm her. She ought 
to be kept free from all possible anxiety or 
excitement. Don’t let her ride — except in 
the quietest way — or walk far enough to fa- 
tigue herself. You might take her up to 
town for a few days on the pretence of see- 
ing picture-galleries or something, and then 
coax her to consult a physician, just for ;^ou?’ 
satisfaction. Make as light as you can of 
her complaint.” 

“Yes, yes. I understand. Oh, God, that 
it should be so, after all, when I thought I 
had come to the end of sorrow'” This in au 


THE FATAL THREE. 


191 


undertone. *‘For pity’s sake, Porter, tell me 
the worst. You think it a bad case?” 

Porter shook his head, tried to speak, 
grasped George Greswold’s hand, and made 
for the door. Mr. and Mrs. Greswold had 
been His patients and friends for the last fif- 
teen years, and in his rough way he was de- 
voted to them. 

“ See Jenner as soon as you can,” he said. 
“It is a very delicate case. I would rather 
not hazard an opinion.” 

George Greswold went out to the lawn 
where he had sat on the Sunday evening be- 
fore Lola’s death. It had been summer then, 
and it was summer now — the time of roses, 
before the song of the nightingale has ceased 
amid the mystery of twilit branches. He 
sat down upon the bench under the cedar, 
and gave himself up to his despair. He had 
tasted again the sweet cup of domestic peace 
— he had been gladdened again by the only 
companionship that had ever filled his heart, 
and now in the near future he saw the pros- 
pect of another parting, and this time with- 
out hope on earth. Once again he told him- 
self that he was marked out by Fate. 

“I suppose it must always be so,” he 
thought ; “ in the lots that fall from the urn 
there must be some that are all of one color 
— black — black as night.” 

Mildred came out to the lawn with him, 
followed by Kassandra, who had deserted the 
master for the mistress since her return, as if 
in a delight mixed with fear, lest she should 
again depart. 

“What has become of you, George? I 
thought you were coming back to the morn- 
ing-room directly, and it is nearly an hour 
since Mr. Porter went away.” 

“I came into the garden — to— to see your 
new shrubbery.” 

“ Did you really? How good of you! It 
is hardly to be called a new shrubbery — only 
a little addition to the old one. It will give 
an idea of distance when the shrubs are good 
enough to grow tall and thick. Will you 
come with me and tell me what you think 
of it?” 

“ Gladly, dear, if it will not tire you.” 

“Tire me to walk to the shrubbery! Ko, 
I am not quite so bad as that, though I find 
I am a bad walker compared with what I 
used to be. I dare say I am out of training. 
I could walk any distance at Brighton last 


autumn. A long walk on the road to Rot- 
tingdean was my only distraction; but at 
Pallanza I began to fiag, and the hotel people 
were always suggesting drives, so I got out 
of the habit of walking.” 

He had his hand through her arm, and 
drew her near him as they sauntered across 
the lawn, with a hopeless wonder at the 
thought that she was here at his side, close 
to his heart, all in all to him to-day, and that 
the time might soon come when she would 
have melted out of his life as that fair daugh- 
ter had done, when the grave under the tree 
should mean a double desolation, an everlast- 
ing despair. 

“ Is there any world where we shall be to- 
gether again?” he asked himself. “ What is 
immortality worth to me if it does not mean 
reunion? To go round upon the endless 
wheel of eternity — to be fixed into the uni- 
versal life — to be a part of the Creator him- 
self? Nothing in a life to come can be gain 
to me if it do not give me back what I have 
lost.” 

They dawdled about the shrubbery, man 
and wife, arm linked with arm, looking at 
the new plantings one by one, she speculating 
how many years each tree would take to 
come to perfection. 

“They will make a very good effect in 
three or four years, George. Don’t you think 
so? That picea nobilis will fill the open space 
yonder. We have allowed ten feet clear on 
every side. The golden-brooms grow only 
too quickly. How serious you look! Are 
you thinking of anything that makes you 
anxious?” 

“lam thinking of Pamela and her sweet- 
heart. I should like to make Lady Lochin- 
var’s acquaintance before the marriage.” 

“ Shall I ask her here?” 

“ She could hardly come, I fancy, while 
the wedding is on the ta'pis. I propose that 
you and I should go up to London to-morrow, 
put up at our old hotel — we shall be more 
independent there than at Grosvenor Gardens 
— and spend a few days quietly, seeing a good 
deal of the picture-galleries, and a little of 
our new connections — and of Rosalind and 
her husband, whom we don’t often see. 
Would you like to do that, Mildred?” 

“I like anything you like. I delight in 
seeing pictures with you, and I shall be glad 
to see Rosalind ; and if Pamela really wishes 


192 


THE FATAL THREE. 


us to be present at her wedding I think we 
ought to be there; don’t you, George?” 

“ If you would like it, dearest, if — ” 

He left the sentence unfinished, fearing to 
betray his apprehension. Till he had con- 
sulted the highest authorities in the land he 
felt that he could know but little of that hid- 
den malady which paled her cheek and gave 
heaviness to the pathetic eyes. 

They were in Cavendish Square, husband 
and wife, on the morning after their arrival 
in town by special appointment with the phy- 
sician. Mildred submitted meekly to a care- 
ful consultation — only for his own satisfac- 
tion, her husband told her, making light of 
his anxiety. 

“ I want you to be governed by the best 
possible advice, dearest, in the care of your 
health.” 

“You don’t think there is danger, George; 
that I am to be taken away from you, just 
when all our secrets and sorrows are over.” 

“ Indeed no, dearest. God grant you may 
be spared to me for happy years to come.” 

“ There is no reason, I think, that it should 
not be so. Mr. Porter said my complaint 
was chiefly nervous. He would not wonder 
at my nerves being in a poor way if he knew 
how I suffered in those long days of banish- 
ment.” 

The examination was long and serious, yet 
conducted by the physician with such gentle 
bonhomie as not to alarm the patient. When 
it was over he dismissed her with a kindly 
smile, after advice given upon very broad 
lines. 

“After the question of diet, which I have 
written for you here,” he said, handing her 
half a sheet of paper, “the only other treat- 
ment I can counsel is self-indulgence. Never 
walk far enough to feel tired — or fast enough 
to be out of breath. Live as much as possible 
in the open air, but let your life out-of-doors 
be the sweet idleness of the sunny South, 
rather than our ideal, bustling, hurrying Brit- 
ish existence. Court repose — rest for body 
and mind in all things.” 


“You mean that I am an invalid for the 
rest of my life, as my poor mother was for 
five years before her death?” 

“At what age did your mother die?” 

“Thirty-four. For a long time the doc- 
tors would hardly say what was the inatter 
with her. She suffered terribly from palpi- 
tation of the heart, as I have done for the 
last six months; but the doctors made light 
of it, and told my father there was very little 
amiss. Towards the end they changed their 
opinion, and owned that there was organic 
disease. Nothing they could do for her 
seemed of much use.” 

Mildred went back to the waiting-room 
whil6 her husband had an interview with the 
doctor; an interview which left him but the 
faintest hope — only the hope of prolonging 
a fading life. 

“ She may last for years, perhaps,” said the 
physician, pitying the husband’s silent agony, 
“but it would be idle to disguise her state. 
She will never be strong again. She must 
not ride, or drive, or occupy herself in any 
way that can involve violent exertion or a 
shock to the nerves. Cherish her as a hot- 
house flower, and she may be with you for 
some time yet.” 

“God bless you, even for that hope,” said 
Greswold, and then he spoke of his niece’s 
wedding, and the wish for Mildred’s pres- 
ence. 

“No harm in a wedding, I think, if you 
are careful of her, no over-exertion, no agi- 
tating scenes. The wedding may cheer her, 
and prevent her brooding on her own state. 
Good -day. I shall be glad to know the 
effect of my prescription, and to see Mrs. 
Greswold again in a month or two, if she 
is strong enough to come to London. If 
you want me at any time in the coun- 
try—” 

“You will come, will you not? Re- 
member she is all that is precious to me 
upon this earth. If I lose her I lose every- 
thing.” 

‘ ‘ Send for me at any time. If it is possible 
for me to go to you I will go.” 


THE FATAL THREE. 


193 


CHAPTER VII. 


LIKE A TALE 

Pamela’s wedding was one of the most 
successful functions of the London season; 
and the society papers described the cere- 
mony with a fulness of detail which satis- 
fied even the bride’s avidity for social fame. 
Mr. Smithson sent her gown just an hour 
before it had to make its reverence before 
the altar in the Abbey ; and Pamela, who had 
been in an almost hysterical agony for an 
hour and a half, lest she should have no gown 
in which to be married, owned, as she pirou- 
etted before the cheval-glass, that the fit was 
worth the suspense. 

The ladies who write fashion articles in 
the two social arbiters were rapturous about 
IVlr. Smithson’s chef-d’ceuvre, and gave glow- 
ing accounts of certain trousseau gowns 
which they had been privileged to review at 
an afternoon tea in Grosvenor Gardens a week 
before the event. Pamela’s delight in these 
paragraphs was intensified by the idea that 
Cesare Castellani would read them, though it 
is hardly likely that listless skimmer of mod- 
ern literature went so deep as fashion articles. 

“ He will see at least that if he had mar- 
ried me he would not have married quite a 
nobody,” said Pamela, in a summer reverie 
upon the blue water in front of The Hook, 
where she and her husband dawdled about 
in a punt nearly all day, expatiating upon 
each other’s merits. And so floats this light 
bark gayly into a safe and placid haven, out 
of reach of privateer or pirate, such as the 
incomparable Castellani. 

It was not until after Pamela’s wedding, 
and nearly a month after Mildred’s discovery 
of the letters in the bookcase, that Miss Faus- 
set made any sign ; but one August morning 
her reply came in the shape of a letter, en- 
treating Mildred to go to her as an act of 
charity to one whose sands had nearly run 
out. 

“ I will not sue to you in forma pauperis f 
she wrote, " so I did not pretend that I am a 
dying woman; but I believe I have not very 
13 


THAT IS TOLD. 

long to live, and before my voice is mute 
upon earth, I want to tell you the history of 
one year of my girlhood. I want you to 
know that I am not altogether the kind of 
sinner you may think me. I will not write 
that history, and if you refuse to come to 
me, I must die and leave it untold, and in 
that case my death-bed will be miserable.” 

Mildred told her husband only that her 
aunt was very ill and ardently desired to see 
her. After some discussion it was arranged 
that she should travel quietly to Brighton, 
he going with her. He suggested that they 
should stop in Miss Fausset’s house for a 
night or two, but Mildred told him she would 
much prefer to stay at a hotel, so it was de- 
cided that they should stop at the quiet ho- 
tel on the East Cliff where Mr. Greswold had 
taken Pamela nearly a year before. 

Mildred’s health had improved under the 
physician’s regime, and her husband felt 
hopeful as they travelled together through 
the summer landscape, by that line which 
she had travelled in her desolation — the level 
landscape with glimpses of blue sea and 
stretches of gray beach or yellow sand, bright 
in the August noontide. 

George Greswold had respected Mildred’s 
reserve, and had never urged her to enlighten 
him as to the secret of his first wife’s parent- 
age; but he had his ideas upon the subject, 
and remembering his interview with the so- 
licitor, and that gentleman’s perturbation at 
the name of Fausset, he was inclined to think 
that the pious lady of Lewes Crescent might 
not be unconcerned in the mystery. And 
now this summons to Brighton seemed to 
confirm his suspicions. 

He went no farther than Miss Fausset’s 
threshold, and allowed his wife to go to her 
aunt alone. 

“I shall ivalk up and down, and wait till 
you come out again,” he said, “so I hope 
that you won’t stay too long.” 

He was anxious to limit an interview which 
might involve agitation for Mildred. He 


194 


THE FATAL THREE. 


parted from her almost reluctantly at the 
door- way of the gloomy house, with its en- 
trance-hall of the pattern of forty years ago, 
furnished with barometer, umbrella-stand, 
and tall chairs, all in Spanish mahogany, and 
with never a picture or a bust, bronze or por- 
celain, to give light and color to the scene. 

Miss Fausset had changed for the worse 
even in the brief interval since Mildred had 
last seen her. She was sitting in the back 
drawing-room, as usual, but her table and 
chair had been wheeled into the bay-window, 
which commanded a garden with a single 
tree, and a variety of house-tops and dead- 
walls. 

“So you have come,” she said, without 
any form of greeting. “I hardly expected 
so much from you. Sit down there, if you 
please. I have a good deal to tell you.” 

“I had intended never to enter your house 
again, aunt, but I could not refuse to hear 
anything you have to say in your own justi- 
fication. Only there is one act of yours which 
you can never justify — either to me or to 
God.” 

“What is that, pray?” 

“ Your refusal to tell me the secret of Fay’s 
birth, when my happiness and my husband’s 
depended upon my knowing it.” 

“ To tell you that would have been to be- 
tray my own secret. Do you think, after 
keeping it for nine-and-thirty years, I was 
likely to surrender it lightly ? I would sooner 
have cut my tongue out. I did what I could 
for you. I told you to ignore idle prejudice 
and to go back to your husband. I told you 
what was due from you to him, over and 
above all sanctimonious scruples. You would 
not listen to me, and whatever misery you 
have suffered it was miseiy of your own 
creation.” 

“Do not let us talk any more about it, 
aunt. I can never think differently about 
the wrong you have done me. Had I not 
found those letters— by the merest accident, 
remember — I might have gone down to my 
grave a desolate woman. I might have died 
in a foreign land, far away from the only 
voice that could comfort me in my last hours. 
No; my opinion of your guilty silence can 
never change. You were willing to break 
two hearts rather than hazard your own rep- 
utation— and yet you must have known that 
I would keep your secret, that I should sym- 


pathize with the sorrow of your girlhood,” 
added Mildred, in softened tones. 

Miss Fausset was slow in replying. Mil- 
dred’s reproaches fell almost unheeded upon 
her ear. It was of herself she was thinking, 
with all the egotism engendered by a lonely 
old age, without ties of kindred or friendship, 
with no society but that of flatterers and 
parasites. 

“ I asked you if you had found any letters 
of your father’s relating to that unhappy 
girl,” she said. “I always feared his habit 
of keeping letters— a habit he learned from 
my father. Yet I hoped that he would have 
burned mine, knowing, as he did, that the 
one desire of my life was to oblitentte that 
hideous past. Vain hope! I was like the 
ostrich. If I hid my secret in England, it 
was known in Italy. The man who destroyed 
my life was a traitor to the core of his heart, 
and he betrayed me to his son. He told 
Cesare how he had fascinated a rich English 
girl, and fooled her with a mock marriage; 
and fifteen years ago the young man presented 
himself to me with the full knowledge of 
that dark blot upon my life — to me, here, 
where I had held my head so high. He let 
me know the full extent of his knowledge 
in his own subtle fashion; but he always 
treated me with profound respect — he pre- 
j tended to be fond of me — and, God help me. 
there was a charm for me in the very sound 
of his voice. The man who cheated me out 
of my life’s happiness was l3dug in his grave 
— death lessens the bitterness of hatred — and 
I could not forget that I had once loved 
him.” 

The tears gathered slowly in the cold gray 
eyes, and rolled slowly down the hollow 
cheeks. 

“ Yes, I loved him, Mildred, loved him with 
a foolish, inexperienced girl’s romantic love. 
I asked no questions. I believed all he told 
me. I flung myself blindfold into the net. 

' His genius, his grace, his fire — ah, you can 
never imagine the charm of his manner, the 
variety of his talent, compared with which his 
son’s accomplishments are paltry. You see me 
now a hard, elderly woman. As a girl I was 
warm-hearted and impetuous, full of enthu- 
siasm and imagination, while I loved and be- 
lieved in my lover. My whole nature changed 
after that gyp.at wrong. My heart w^as fro- 
zen,” 


THE FATAL THREE. 


195 


There was a silence of some moments, and 
then Miss Fausset continued in short, agitated 
sentences, her fingers fidgeting nervously 
with the double eye-glass which she wore on 
a slender gold chain: 

“ It was his genius I worshipped. He was 
at the height of his success. The Milanese 
raved about liim as a rival to Donizetti— his 
operas were the rage. Can you wonder that 
I — a girl — passionately fond of music — was 
carried away by the excitement which was 
in the very air I breathed? I went to the 
opera night after night, I heard that fasci- 
nating music till its melodies seemed inter- 
■vvoven with my very being. I suppose I 
was weak enough to let the composer see 
how much I admired him. He had quarrelled 
with his wife— and the quarrel — caused by 
his own misconduct— had resulted in a sep- 
aration which was supposed to be permanent. 
There may have been people in Milan who 
knew that he was a married man; but my 
chaperon did not, and he was careful to sup- 
press the fact from the beginning of our ac- 
quaintance. 

“Yes, no doubt he found out that I was 
madly in love with him. He pretended to 
be interested in my musical studies. He ad- 
vised and taught me. He played the violin 
divinely, and we used to play concertante 
duets during the long evenings, while my 
chaperon dozed by the fire, caring very little 
how I amused myself so long as I did not in- 1 
terfere with her comfort. She was a sensual, | 
selfish creature, given over to self-indulgence, ; 
and she let me have my own way in every- 1 
thing. He used to join me at the cathedral i 
at vespers. How my heart thrilled when I 
found him there sitting in the shadowy chan- 
cel in the gray November light! for I knew 
it was for my sake he went there, not from 
any religious feeling. Our hands used to 
meet and clasp each other almost uncon- 
sciously when the music moved us as it went 
soaring up to the gorgeous roof, in the dim 
light of the swinging lamps. I have found | 
myself kneeling with my hand in his when 
I came out of a dream of Paradise to which | 
that exquisite music had lifted me. Yes, I ; 
loved him, Mildred; I loved him as well as | 
ever you loved your husband — as passionate- j 
ly and unselfishly as woman ever loved. I j 
rejoiced in the thought that I was rich, for , 
his sake. I planned the life that we were to I 


live together; a life in which I was to be sub- 
ordinate to him in all things^his adoring 
slave. I suppose most girls have some such 
dream. God help them when it ends as mine 
did!” 

Again there was a silence — a chilling mute- 
ness upon Mildred’s part. How could she 
be sorry for this woman who had never been 
sorry for others ; who had let her child travel 
from the cradle to the grave without one ray 
of maternal love to light her dismal journey? 
She remembered Fay’s desolate life and 
blighted nature — Fay, who had a heart large 
enough for a great unselfish love. She re- 
membered her aunt’s impenetrable silence 
when a word would have restored happiness 
to a ruined home ; she remembered, and her 
heart was hardened against this proud, selfish 
woman, whose life had been one long sacri- 
fice to the world’s opinion. 

“I loved him, Mildred, and I trusted him 
as I would have trusted any man who had 
the right to call himself a gentleman,” pur- 
sued Miss Fausset, eager to justify herself in 
the face of that implacable silence. “ I had 
been brought up after the fashion of those 
days, in a state of primeval innocence. I had 
never even in fiction been allowed to come 
face to face with the cruel realities of life. I 
was educated in an age which thought ‘ Jane 
Eyre ’ an improper novel, and which restrict- 
ed a young woman’s education to music and 
modern languages— the latter taught so bad- 
ly, for the most part, as to be useless when she 
travelled. My knowledge of Italian would 
just enable me to translate a libretto when I 
had it before me in print, to ask my way in 
the streets, but it was hardly enough to make 
me understand the answer. It never entered 
into my mind to doubt Paolo Castellani when 
he told me that although we could not, as 
Papist and Protestant, be married in any 
church in Milan, we could be united by a 
civil marriage before a Milanese authority, 
and that such a marriage would be binding 
all the world over. Had I been a poor girl 
I might of my own instinct have suspected 
treachery; but I was rich and he was poor, 
and he would be a gainer by our marriage. 
Servants and governesses had impressed mo 
with the sense of my own importance, and I 
knew that I was what is called a good match. 
So I fell into the trap, IMildred, as foolishly 
as a snared bird. I crept out of the house 


196 


THE FATAL THREE. 


one morning after my music lesson, found 
my lover waiting for me with a carriage close 
by, went with him to a dingy office in a dingy 
street, but which had a sufficiently official air 
to satisfy my ignorance, and went through a 
certain formula, hearing something read over j 
by an elderly man of grave appearance, and | 
signing my name to a document after Paolo 
had signed his. i 

“It was all a sham and a cheat, Mildred, j 
The old man was a Milanese attorney, with | 
no more power to marry us than he had to j 
make us immortal. The paper was a deed 
of gift by which Paolo Castellan! transferred 
some imaginary property to me. The whole 
thing was a farce; but it was so cleverly 
'planned that the cheat was effected without 
the aid of an accomplice. The old man act- j 
ed in all good faith, and my blind confidence i 
and ignorance of Italian accepted a common 
legal formality as a marriage. I went from 
that dark little office into the spring sunshine 
happy as ever bride went out of church, kiss- 
ed and complimented by a throng of approv- 
ing friends. I cared very little as to what 
my brother might think of this clandestine 
marriage. He would have refused his consent 
beforehand, no doubt, but he would reconcile 
himself to the inevitable by-and-by. In any j 
event I should be independent of his control, i 
My fortune would be at my own disposal 
after my one-and-twentieth birthday, mine 
to throw into my husband’s lap. 

“That is nearly the end of my story, Mil- 
dred. We went from Milan to Como, and 
after a few days at Bellagio crossed the St. 
Gothard, and sauntered from one lovely scene 
to another till we stopped at Vevay. For 
just six weeks I lived in a fool’s paradise; 
but by that time my brother had traced us 
to Vevay — having learned all that could be 
learned about Castellani at Milan before he 
started in pursuit of us. He came, and my } 
dream ended. I knew that I was a dishon- 
ored woman, and that all my education, my 
innate pride in myself, and my fortune had 
done for me was to place me as low as the 
lowest creature in the land. I left Vevay 
within an hour of that revelation a broken- 
hearted woman. I never saw my destroyer’s 
face again. You know all, Mildred, now. 
Can you wonder that I shrank with ab- 
horrence from the offspring of my disgrace 
— that I refused ever to see her after I 


had once released myself from the hateful 
tie?” 

“ Yes, I do wonder, I must always wonder 
that you were merciless to her— that you had 
no pity for that innocent life.” 

“Ah, you are your father’s daughter. He 
wished me to hide myself in some remote 
village so that I might taste the sweets of 
maternal affection, enjoy the blessed privilege 
of rearing a child who at every instant of her 
life would remind me of the miserable infat- 
uation that had blighted my own. Ho, Mil- 
dred, I was not made for such an existence 
as that. I have tried to do good to others, I 
have labored for God’s Church and God’s 
poor. That has been my atonement.” 

“It would have been a better atonement 
to have cared for your own flesh and blood ; 
but with your means and opportunities 3"ou 
might have done both. I loved Fay, remem- 
ber, aunt. I cannot forget how bright and 
happy she might have been. I cannot forget 
the wrongs that warped her nature.” 

“You are very hard, Mildred, hard to a 
woman whose days are numbered.” 

“Are not my days numbered, aunt?” cried 
Mildred, with a sudden burst of passion. 
“Was not my heart broken when I left this 
house last year to go into loneliness and exile, 
abandoning a husband I adored? That part- 
ing was my death-blow. In all the long 
dreary days that have gone by since then 
my hold upon life has been loosening. You 
might have saved me that agony. You might 
have sent me back to my home rejoicing, 
and you would not. Y on cared more for your 
own pride than for my happiness. You 
might have made your daughter’s life happy, 
and you would not. You cared more for 
the world’s esteem than for her welfare. As 
you sacrificed her, your daughter, you have 
sacrificed me, your niece. I know that I am 
doomed. Just when God has given me back 
the love that makes life precious, I feel the 
hand of Death upon me, and know that the 
hour of parting is near.” 

“I have been a sinner, Mildred; but I have 
suffered — I have suffered. You ought not 
to judge me. You have never known shame.” 

That last appeal softened Mildred’s heart. 
She went over to her aunt’s chair, and leaned 
over her and kissed her. 

“ Let the past be forgotten,” she said, “ and 
let us part in love.” 


THE FATAL THREE. 


197 


And so, a quarter of an hour later, they 
parted, never to meet again on earth. 

Miss Fausset died in the early winter, cut 
off by the first frost, like a delicate flower. 
She had made no change in the disposal of 
her property, and her death made Mildred 
Greswold a very rich woman. 

“My aunt loved the poor,” said Mildred, 
when she and her husband spoke of this in- 
crease of wealth. “We are both so much 
richer than our needs, George. We have 


lived in sunshine for the most part. When 
I am gone I should like you to do some great 
thing for those who live in shadow.” 

“My beloved, I shall remain upon this 
earth only to obey your will.’^ 

He lived only long enough to keep his 
promise.' The Greswold Hospital remains, a 
monument of thoughtful beneficence, in one 
of the most wretched neighborhoods south of 
the Thames, but George Greswold and his 
race are ended like a tale that is told. 


THE END. 









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MISS BRADDON’S NOVELS. 


Miss Braddon has always been justly praised for the originality and the dramatic intensity of her plots. 
Her style is brilliant and spirited ; her books show a close observation of human nature, and a happy faculty 
in describing its deeper phases ; and her invention leads her far from the track of conventionality. Her 
books are held in high esteem on the Continent, and have been translated into almost every civilized tongue ; 
while her talents have not been thought unworthy of analysis by some of the best French and German 
critics. She has written no book in which there are not evidences of unusual intellectual power. Though 
plot is evidently of leading importance in her eyes, she carefully elaborates her style, and closely studies her 
dramatis personce. — Saturday Evening Gazette, Boston. 

Whether in “Aurora Floyd,” “Fenton’s Quest,” “ To the Bitter End,” “Birds of Prey,” or what not, her 
keen observation, picturesque or graphic description, and powerful analysis of character and motive are rec- 
ognized and universally admired. — Commonwealth, Boston. 

Miss Braddon’s literary freshness is equalled only by her literary fertility, and deserves to be considered,- as 
indeed it is, one of the wonders of the nineteenth century fiction. Perhaps it is this attribute of her genius — 
the novelty of the charm with which her successive works are invariably invested — which is the surest and 
most eloquent proof of the grasp and vigor of her intellectual powers . — The Hour, London. 

Miss Braddon always wields a vigorous and incisive pen, and could not possibly write a dull chapter or 
page . — Commercial Bulletin, Boston. 

"Miss Braddon has contrived to preserve the constructive skill, the narrative vigor, and the power of 
description which gave additional attraction to the “sensation” of “Lady Audley’s Secret,” while at the 
same time she has attained to the higher mysteries of her craft. She has learned how to depict character 
with intense truth, and yet with an art which is triumphant because its processes are imperceptible, and 
only the result is presented to the reader. She has learned to be independent of mere incident in giving 
interest to her books : and they are, in consequence, as superior to her first efibrts as a sonata of Beethoven’s 
to the music of OfTenbach’s last extravaganza . — Edinburgh Daily Review. 

There is a marvellous freshness about Miss Braddon. She writes so much and so often that one can only 
wonder to find her writing so well. By all recognized rules she ought long ago to have written herself out. 
As a matter of fact, however, her work seems to improve. — Athenceum, Loudon. 


A STRANGE WORLD. 8vo, Paper, 40 cents. 

AN OPEN VERDICT. 8vo, Paper, 35 cents. 

ASPHODEL. 4to, Paper, 16 cents. 

AURORA FLOYD. 8vo, Paper, 40 cents. 

BARBARA; OR, SPLENDID MISERY. 4to, 
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BIRDS OF PREY. Illustrated. 8vo, Paper, 60 
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BOUND TO JOHN COMPANY. Illustrated. 
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CHARLOTTE’S INHERITANCE. 8vo, Paper, 
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CUT BY THE COUNTY. 12mo, Paper, 26 
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ELEANOR’S VICTORY. 8vo, Paper, 60 cents. 

FENTON’S QUEST. Illustrated. 8vo, Paper, 
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FLOWER AND WEED. 4to, Paper, 10 cents. 

HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE. Illustrated. 8vo, 
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ISHMAEL. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. 

JOHN MARCHMONT’S LEGACY. 8yo, Paper, 
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JOSHUA HAGGARD'S DAUGHTER. Illus- 
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JUST AS I AM. 4to, Paper, 15 cents. 


LOST FOR LOVE. Illustrated. 8vo, Paper, 60 
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MOHAW’'KS, 4to, Paper, 20 cents. 

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STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS. Illustrated. 
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TAKEN AT THE FLOOD. 8vo, Paper, 60 
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THE MISTLETOE BOUGH FOR 1878. 4to, 
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VIXEN. 4to, Paper, 15 cents. 

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IIauper & Brotiieus will send any of the above loorks by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United 

States or Canada, on receipt of the price. 


W. CLAKK RUSSELL’S WORKS. 


Pi’Obably no living writer of sea stories equals Mr. Russell. . . . There is in his pages the wonderful charm 
of the sea, and the charm of the most absolute naturalness as weW.— Christian Advocate, Syracuse, N. Y. 

Nothing could be better than Mr. Russell’s pictures of sea scenery, of the terrors of'tempests, the ominous 
stillness of calm, of all the wonderful phenomena of the ocean. In this kind of writing he is, we think, un- 
surpassed. — Spectator, Loudon. 

Mr. Russell is master of his subject, and writes in a powerful and instructive as well as interesting way.— 
San Francisco Chronicle. 

The author, well worthy to rank with Dana, is an entertaining and instructive writer, in whom “ Poor 
Jack ” has indeed found a friend and not a caricaturist. — Commomoealth, Boston. 

A man who is master of his theme, and who has a happy sty]e.— Brooklyn Union. . _ 

The sea and seamen have never been so well described. . . . The author has done for the merchant sailor 
what Marryat did for the mau-o’-war’s man. ... If Dana and Defoe had written together, they could not 
have produced anything better.— Fan% Fair, Loudon. 

A novel by Mr. Clark Russell cannot fail to reach the strongest interest, and to be characterized by the 
genips of one who, beyond all writers, understands sailors and the sen.— The Graphic, Loudon. 

As a writer on all subjects connected with the sea and those who live on it, he is without a rival. — Morn- 
ing Post, London. 


A BOOK FOR THE HAMMOCK. 

4to, Paper, 20 cents. 

A SAILOR’S SWEETHEART. 

4to, Paper, 15 cents. 

A SEA QUEEN. 

16mo, Half Cloth, $1 00; 4to, Paper, 20 cents. 

A STRANGE VOYAGE. 

4to, Paper, 20 cents. 

AN OCEAN FREE-LANCE. 

4to, Paper, 20 cents. 

AULD LANG SYNE. 

4 to. Paper, 10 cents. 

IN THE MIDDLE WATCH. 

16mo, Paper, 25 cents. 

JACK’S COURTSHIP. 

16rao, Half Cloth, 75 cts.; 4to, Paper, 25 cents. 

JOHN HOLDSWORTH, CHIEF MATE. 

. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. 


LITTLE LOO. 

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MY WATCH BELOW. 

4to, Paper, 20 cents. 

ON THE FO’K’SLE HEAD. 

4 to. Paper, 15 cents. 

\ 

ROUND THE GALLEA^-FIRE. 

4to, Paper, 15 cents. 

THE FROZEN PIRATE. 

4to, Paper, 25 cents. 

THE GOLDEN HOPE. 

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THE “LADY MAUD.” 

Illustrated. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. 

THE WRECK OF THE “GROSVE- 
NOR.” 

8vo, Paper, 30 'cents ; 4to, Paper, 15 cents. 

VOYAGE TO THE CAPE. 

16mo, Paper, 25 cents. 


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H. RIDER HAGGARD’S STORIES. 


There are color, splendor, and passion everywhere; action in abundance; constant variety and absorb- 
ing interest. Mr. Haggard does not err on the side of niggardliness; he is only too affluent in description 
and ornament. . . . Tliere is a largeness, a freshness, and a strength about him which are full of promise and 
encouragement, the more since he has placed himself so unmistakably on the romantic side of fiction ; that 
is, on the side of truth and permanent value. ... He is already one of the foremost modern romance writers. 
— iV. Y. World. 

Mr. Haggard has a genius, not to say a great talent, for story-telling. . . . That he should have a large 
circle of readers in England and this country, where so many are trying to tell stories with no stories to 
tell, is a healthy sign, in that it shows that the love of fiction, pure and simple, is as strong as it was in 
the days of Dickens and Thackeray and Scott, the older days of Smollett and Fielding, and the old, old days 
of Le Sage and Cervantes. — X. Y. Mail and Express. 

That region of the universe of romance which Mr. Haggard has opened up is better worth a visit than any 
that has been explored for many a long year.— .S't. James Gazette, London. 

Mr. Haggard has won his fame by good work and pleased his hundreds of thousands.— jY. Y. Times. 

Mr. Haggard’s grand descriptive powers would alone insure a wide following, but, joined with the savage 
grandeur of his romantic conceptions, they take the reading public by storm.— .Boston Commonwealth. 

There is a charm in tracing the ingenuity of the author, and a sense of satisfaction in his firm grasp of his 
subject. There is no uncertainty at all, no groping after material, but one vivid scene follows another, until 
the reader says to himself, “Here, at last, is a novelist who is not attempting to spread out one dramatic sit- 
uation so thin that it can be made to do duty for an entire volume ; a man of resource, imagination, and inven- 
tion .” — Chicago Herald. 

Mr. H. Rider Haggard is one of the best of the younger English novelists. He has been before the public 
little more than three years, and yet in that time he has won a place for himself in the front rank of imagina- 
tive writers . — Sart Francisco Argonaut. 

Mr. Haggard’s descriptions of events, of inanimate nature, and of certain phases of human character are 
almost unrivalled in their virility and y\gox.— Saturday Revieio, London. 

Few novels of recent years have so quickly taken hold of and so easily retained public taste and fancy. — 
New Orleans Times-Democrat. ^ 

Mr. Haggard has a wonderful imagination, fine power of description, and the art of holding the attention 
of the reader with unflagging interest.- LM^Aeran Observer, Philadelphia. 

Mr. Haggard’s characters all stand out upon the pages like pictures upon the canvas of the master artist. 
They are life-like and natural, excite love and hate, and their histories seem at all times to be real histories 
of real people. It is rare art that can make the reader so completely forget that these men and women are 
only creatures of the imagination . — Chicago Inter-Ocean. 


SHE. Illustrated. 4to, Paper, 25 cents ; 
16mo, Half Cloth, 75 cents ; 16mo, Pa- 
per, 25 cents. 

KING SOLOMON’S MINES. 4to, Pa- 
per, 20 cents; 16mo, Half Cloth, 75 
cents. 

MR. MEESON’S WILL. 16mo, Half 
Cloth, 75 cents ; Paper, 25 cents. 


JESS. 4to, Paper, 15 cents ; 16 mo. Half 
Cloth, 75 cents. 

DAWN. With One Illustration. 16mo, 
Half Cloth, 75 cents. 

THE WITCH’S HEAD. 16ino, Half 
Cloth, 75 cents. 

ALLAN QUATERMAIN. Illustrated. 
16rao, Paper, 25 cents; 16mo, Half 
Cloth, 75 cents. 


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Habpeb & Bbotuebs will send any of the above works by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the 

United States or Canada, on receipt of the price. 


WILLIAM BLACK’S NOVELS. 


Mr. Black never relies for effect upon violent means. He contrives by delicate, subtle, but sure touches, 
to win the interest of his readers, and to retain it till tlie last volume is laid down with reluctance.— CrZo&e, 
London. 

His success, which is undoubtedly great, is due to a careful study and competent knowledge of char- 
acter, to a style which is free from bleniish, and to a power of graphic description which is but very seldom 
met with.— Saturday Review, London. 

Mr. Black knows so well just what to describe, and to what length, that the scenery of his novels seems 
to have been freshened by soft spring rains. His painting of character, his conversations and situations, are 
never strongly dramatic and exciting, but they are thoroughly good. He never gives us a tame or tiresome 
chapter. — N. Y. Tribune. 

Mr. Black’s novels present vivid pictures of the life and thought of the age, which they will preserve for 
future times, as earlier great masters of fiction have preserved for our time the thoughts and sentiments of 
periods long since passed away. Mr. Black is doing for these times what Thackeray and Dickens, Lytton 
and Beaconsfield did for an earlier contemporary period; and what Fielding and Smollett did for the opening 
years of the Georgian era. — Boston Traveller. 

Mr. Black is, in many respects, the best novelist of the present time. His work is as representative as 
the poetry of Mr. Tennyson or the criticism of Mr. Stedinan— it is in delicate and sympathetic harmony with 
the spirit of the Portland Press. 


HARPER’S LIBRARY EDITION. 

12mo, Cloth, $] 25 per volume.^ 


A DAUGHTER OF HETH. 

A PRINCESS OF THULE. 

GREEN PASTURES AND PICCADILLY. 
IN SILK ATTIRE. 

JUDITH SHAKESPEARE. Illustrated. 
KILMENY. 

MACLEOD OF DARE. Illustrated. 
MADCAP VIOLET. 

SABINA ZEMBRA. 

SHANDON BELLS. Illustrated. 


I SUNRISE. 

I THAT BEAUTIFUL WRETCH. Illustrated. 

' THE STR.\NGE ADVENTURES OF A PHAE- 
I ’TON. 

THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A HOUSE- 
BOAT. Illustrated. 

THREE FEATHERS. 

WHITE HEATHER. 

WHITE WINGS. 

YOLANDE. Illdstrated. 


HAEPER’S POPULAR EDITION. 


A DAUGHTER OF HETH. 8vo, Paper, 35 cts. 
A PRINCESS OF THULE. 8vo, Paper, 50 cts. 
AN ADVENTURE IN THULE. 4to, Paper, 10 
cents. 

GREEN PASTURES AND PICCADILLY. 8vo, 
Paper, 50 cents. 

IN SILK ATTIRE. 8vo, Paper, 36 cents. 
JUDITH SHAKESPEARE. 4to, Paper, 20 cts. 
KILMENY. 8vo, Paper, 35 cents. 

MACLEOD OF DARE. .8vo, Paper, Illustrated, 
60 cents; 4to, Paper, 15 cents. 

MADCAP VIOLET. 8vo, Paper, 50 cents. 
SABINA ZEMBRA. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. 
SHANDON BELLS. Ill’d. 4to, Paper, 20 cts. 
SUNRISE. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. 


THAT BEAUTIFUL WRETCH. Illustrated. 
4 to, Paper, 20 cents. 

THE MAID OF KILLEENA, THE MARRIAGE 
OF MOIRA FERGUS, and Other Stories. 8vo, 
Paper, 40 cents. 

THE MONARCH OF MINCING-LANE. Ulus- 
trated. 8vo, Paper, 60 cents. 

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TON. 8vo, Paper, 50 cents. 

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THREE FEATHERS. Ill’d. 8vo, Paper, 60 cts. 

AVHITE HEATHER. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. 

WHITE WINGS. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. 

YOLANDE. Illustrated. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. 


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Harpkr & Brothers will send any of the above works by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United 
States or Canada, on receipt of the price. 


WALTER BESANT’S WORKS. 


We give without hesitatiou the foremost place to Mr. Besant, whose work, always so admirable and spiis 
ited, acquires double importauce from the euthusiasm with which it is inspired. — Blackwood's Magazine, 
Edinburgh. 

Mr. Besant wields the wand of a wizard, let him wave it in whatever direction he will. . . . The spell that 
dwells iu this wand is formed by intense earnestness and vivid imagination, two gifts which, even when em- 
ployed in ways not altogether congenial, will force and captivate tire fancy of all such readers as are them- 
selves endowed with them iu any measure. — Spectator, London. 

Mr. Besant never produces a novel which is not warmly welcomed by all thoughtful readers. ... lie 
works as an artist works — with loving care. He creates, and he makes beautiful.— ,S'cotsman, Edinburgh. 

There is a blufl', honest, hearty, and homely method about Mr. Besaut’s stories which makes them accept- 
able, and because he is so easily understood is another reason why he is so particularly relished by the Eng- 
lish public. — N. Y. Times. 

Mr. Besant, with sound wisdom, writes stories that are socially old-fashioned rather than historical ; con- 
tent to charm us back for something like a century, and choosing a comparative!}’’ modern field, he appeals to 
a more popular circle of interests. Carefully assuring his solid substratum of fact, he can be conscientiously 
realistic, and he gives his readers convictions rather than impressions. His books strike us as models of what 
novels ought to be; for with all the literary talent which we may fairly call genius, he never spares the labor 
which makes finished and satisfactory workmanship. Yet it is evident that with him the labor is no drudg- 
ery.— (Saturday Revieiv, London. 


Paper, 25 cents. 

ALL IN A GARDEN 
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“SELF OR BEARER.” 
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1 2mo, 

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A Novel. 4to, Paper, 


THE CHILDREN OF 
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THE HOLY ROSE. A 
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DOROTHY FORSTER. 
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TO CALL HER MINE. 
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GIDEON. A Novel. 
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THE WORLD WENT VERY WELL THEN. 
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HERR PAULUS: HIS RISE, HIS GREAT- 
NESS, AND HIS FALL. A Novel. 8vo, 
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LIFE OF COLIGNY. 

UNCLE JACK, AND OTHER STORIES. 

FAIR. 


WORKS BY WALTER BESANT AND JAMES RICE. 


THE GOLDEN BUTTERFLY. A Novel. 8vo, 
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WHEN THE SHIP COMES HOME. A Novel. 
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JAMES PAYN’S WORKS 


Those who are familiar with the writings of this author will, we fancy, agree with us that it is rather 
difficult to give any adequate notion of the contents in the sort of sketch and comment combined which is 
commonly known as?a “review ” the reason being that so great is the sustainment of his tales, so completely 
does almost every page contain something of incident, or illustration, or whatever is necessary to keep them 
going, that it is hardly possible to deal with them in mere outline. — Morning Post, London. 

The author has a keen sense of humor and quick perception of character, and a certain freshness of style 
which is remarkable in a writer of such unbounded fertility. We doubt whether Mr. Wilkie Collins could 
manage to dovetail together a number of characters and incidents more skilfully. Revieio, 
London, 

No other author possesses in a greater degree the happy gift of compelling a laugh to follow a humorous 
sally as-infallibly as the tinkling of a bell results from pulling it. — Pall Msll Gazette, London. 

Mr. l^ayn has been steadily rising in repute, and attracting attention, alike by the versatiliy of his talent 
and the surprising industry with which he works. There is nothing unfinished, nothing careless, about his 
novels ; not a trace of “ slop ” work in his carefully drawn and consistent characters, in his vividly realistic 
descriptions, and in his elaborate and remarkably original plots. He is an earnest and conscientious artist, 
and does well whatevei' he undertakes. — Examiner, London. 

It is always a pleasure to read Mr. Payn’s novels. He never takes to stilts, and is never uninteresting. 
He is scholarly and graphic, is skilful in the construction of his plots, dramatic in the arrangement of his 
incidents, and never premature in his denouements.— Albany Evening Journal. 


A BEGGAR ON HORSEBACK ; or, a County 
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MAKPEll’S FRANKLIN S<iXJAUE LIBRARY-Contiimed. 


CENTS. 

500. Cradle and Spade. A Novel, liy William Sime 20 

501. The Golden Flood. By Francillon Senior 15 

602. “ Self or Bearer.” A Novel. By Walter Besant 15 

503. First Person Singular. By D. C. Murray. Ill’d. 25 

504. Unfairly Won. By Nannie Power O’Donoglme. 20 

505. England Under Gladstone, By J. H. McCarthy. 20 

600. Original Comic Operas. Written by W. S. Gilbert 20 

507. A Country Gentleman, By Mrs. Oliphant 20 

508,521,521a. W ar and Peace. By Tolstoi'. 3 Parts. Each 25 

509. Kainbow Gold. By David Christie Murray 20 

510. A Girton Girl. By Mrs. Annie Edwardes 20 

511. A House Divided Against Itself. By Mrs. Oliphant 20 

512. Whatls Mine’s Mine. By George Macdonald. . . 20 

513. Aunt Parker. By B. L. B’arjeon 20 

514. Until the Day Breaks. By Emily Spender 20 

515. Griselda. A Novel 20 

510. Lord Vanecourt’s Daughter. By Mabel Collins. 20 

517. Captain Dangerous. By G. A. Sala 20 

518. The Mystery of Allan Gralc. By I. F. Mayo,. . . 20 

519. Last Days of the Consulate. By M. Fauriel 20 

520. Major Frank. By A. L. G. Bosbooni-Toussaint. 20 

522. Demos: A Story of English Socialism 25 

523. Trust Me. A Novel. By Mrs. John K. Spender. 20 

524. England’s Supremacy. By J. S. Jeans 20 

525. A Stern Chase. A Novel. By Mrs. Cashel Iloey. 20 

520. TheHlussian Storm-Cloud. By Stepniak 20 

527. Killed in the Open. A Novel. By Mrs, E. Kennard 20 

528, Marjorie. A Novel. By K. S. Macquoid 20 

629. In the Old Palazzo. ANovel. By Gertrude Forde 20 
530. The Crack of Doom. A Novel. By Wm. Minto. 20 

- 631. The Heir of the Ages. By James l\ayn. Ill’d.. 25 
632. Buried Diamonds. A Novel. By Sarah Tytler. 20 
533. A Faire Damzell. A Novel, By Esm6 Stuart. . 25 


534. Pomegranate Seed. ANovel 20 

535. Like Lucifer. A Novel. By Denzil Vane 20 

530. Keep my Secret. ANovel. By G. M, Robins. . 20 

537. The Chilcotes ; or. Two Widows. By L, Keith . . 20 

538. The One Thing Needful. By Miss Braddon, ... 20 

539. Two Pinches of Snuff. By William Westall 20 

640. The Court of Prance. By Lady Jackson 25 

541. St. Briavels. ANovel. By Mary Deane 20 

542. Ottilie. By Vernon Lee. — The Prince of the Hun- 

dred Soups. Edited by Vernon Lee 20 

543. Ancient American Politics. ByHughJ. Hastings 30 

544. Both in the Wrong, By Mrs. J. K. Spender 20 

545. Autobiography of Leigh Hunt 20 

540. Clare of Claresmede. ANovel. By Chas. Gibbon. 20 

547. The Touchstone of Peril. By R. E. Forrest .... 20 

548. This Man’s Wife. By George Manville Fenn. . . 20 

549. Paston Cafew. By E. Lynn Linton 20 

550. Sir James Appleby, Bart. By K. S. Macquoid. . 20 

551. The Children of Gibeon. By Walter Besant 20 

652. King Solomon’s Mines. By H. Rider Haggard. 20 

553. Mohawks. ANovel. By Miss M. E. Braddon. . 20 

554. The Son of Ilis Father. By Mrs. Oliphant 20 

55.5. A Daughter of the People. By G. M. Craik 20 

5.56, A Wilful Young Woman. ANovel.,, 20 

557. The World Went Very Well Then. A Novel. By 

Walter Besant. Profusely Illustrated 25 


5.58. She. By H. R. Haggard. Profusely Illustrated 25 
559. John Westacott. A Novel. By James Baker. . 20 
660. The Girl in the Brown Habit. By Mrs. Kennard 20 
.561. Dorothy Forster. A Novel. By Walter Besant. 20 
662. Devon Boys. ByG. M. Fenn. Illustrated... . 25 

563. A Near Relation. ANovel. By C, R. Coleridge. 20 

564. Elizabeth’s Fortune. A Novel. By Bertha Thomas 20 

565. Gladys Fane. By T. Wemyss Reid 20 

566. 'J’he Fawcetts and Garods. By Sfiim.ath 20 

.567. Jess. A Novel. By H. Rider Haggard 15 

568. Springhaven. ANovel. By J. D. Blackmore. . 25 

569. The Merry Men, &c. By Robert L. Stevenson. . 15 

570. Kidnapped.— Str.ange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 

Hyde,— Treasure Island. By R. L. Stevenson . 20 
.571. The Golden Hope. By W. Clark Russell 20 

572. The Woodlanders. By Thomas Hardy 20 

573. Sabina Zembra. A Novel. By William Black. 20 


CENTS, 


574. The Bride of the Nile, By Georg Ebers 25 

575. Knight-Errant. ANovel. By Edna Lyall 20 

576. Charles Reade. A Memoir 25 

577. Amaryllis at the Pair. By Richard Jefferies. . . 15 

578. Garrison Gossip. By John Strange Winter 15 

579. Glow-worm Tales. By James Payn 20 

580. In the Name of the Tzar. By J. Belford Dayne. 15 

581. Next of Kin — Wanted. By Miss M. B. Edwards 20 

582. Marrying and Giving in Marriage. A Novel. 

By Mrs. Molesworth 15 

583. To Call Her Mine. By Walter Besant. Ill’d ... 15 

584. Disappeared. By Sarah Tytler 15 

585. Amor Vincit. A Novel, By Mrs, Herbert Martin 20 

586. A Lost Reputation. ANovel 15 

587. A Choice of Chance. By William Dobson 20 

588. 99 Dark Street. ANovel, By F. W. Robinson. 15 

589. Present Position of European Politics. By Sir 

Charles W. Dilke 20 

590. “V. R;” Or, The Adventures of Three Days in 

1837 (With Two Nights Between). By E. Rose. 15 

591. Jacobi’s Wife. A Novel. By Adeline Sergeaiit 20 

592. The Holy Rose. ANovel. By Walter Besant. . 20 
59.3. The O’Donnells of Inchfawn. A Novel. By 

L, T. Meade. With One Illustration 20 

594. Prison Life in Siberia. By Fedor Dosto'i'effsky. 

Translated by H. Sutherland Edwards 20 

595. In Bad Hands, and Other Stories. By F, W. 

Robinson 20 

596. Weeping Ferry. A Novel. By George Halse, . . 20 

597. Essays and Leaves from a Note -Book. By 

George Eliot 20 

598. More True Than Truthful. A Novel. By Mrs. 

Charles M. Clarke 20 

599. A Book for the Hammock. By W. Clark Russell. 20 

600. The Great World. ANovel, By Joseph Hatton. 20 

601. Diane De Breteuille. A Love Story. By Hubert 

E. H. Jerningham 15 

602. Madame’s Granddaughter. ANovel, By Frances 

Mary Peard 15 

603. Paddy at Home (“ C/tez Paddy"). By Baron E. De 

Mandat-Grancey. Translated by A. P. Morton. 20 

604. An Ugly Duckling. A Novel. By Henry Erroll. 20 

605. A Fair Crusader. A Story of To-day. By 

William Westall 20 

606. One that Wins. A Novel. By the Author of 

“Whom Nature Leadeth” 20 

607. The Frozen Pirate. A Novel. By W. Clark 

Russell. Illustrated 25 

608. Friend MacDonald and the Land of the Moun- 

seer. By Max O’Rell 20 

609. Her Two Millions. A Novel. By William 

Westall. Illustrated 25 

610. Mere Suzanne, and Other Stories. By Katha- 

rinfe S. Macquoid 20 

61 L In Exchange for a Soul. A Novel. By Mary 

Linskill. 20 

612. Character. By Samuel Smiles 20 

613. Katharine Regina. A Novel, By Walter Be- 

sant 15 

614. Miser Farebrother. ANovel. By B, L, Farjeon, 

Illustrated 25 

615. Thrift. By Samuel Smiles 20 

616. For the Right. A Novel. By Karl Emil Fran- 

zos. Translated by Julie Sutter. With a Pre- 
face by George Macdonald, LL.D 3o 

617. Only a Coral Girl. A Novel. By Gertrude Forde 30 

618. Herr Paulus. A Novel. By Walter Besant — 35 

619. The Life of William L, Emperor of Germany 

and King of Prussia. Illustrated '. 10 

620. Joyce. A Novel. By Mrs. Oliphant 35 

621. Wessex Tales. By Thomas Hardy 30 

622. The Strange Adventures of a House-Boat. , A 

Novel. By William Black. Illustrated !.. 50 

623. The Mystery of Mirbridge. ANovel. By James 

Payn, Illustrated 50 

624. The Fatal Three. A Novel. By M. E. Braddon sn 


r»iibli.sliea P»y HARPKIi BROTHERS, New York. 

IIaiwkr & Brothers will send any of the. above works by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, 

or Canada, on receipt. of the price. 








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A Perfect Eticyclopsedia of Literature and Art.” I “An Illustrated History of Current Events.” 














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